Into The Fire
Into The Fire
Anne Stuart
A year ago Jamie learned that her beloved cousin, Nate, had been killed. Beaten to death in what police suspect was a drug deal gone wrong, he was found by his childhood friend Dillon Gaynor.Dillon had always been the baddest of the bad boys, leading Nate astray, and Jamie knows he has the answers to her questions about Nate's death. He's not about to volunteer any information, and Jamie's only choice is to head to the Wisconsin town where he lives to find the answers for herself.Jamie shows up unannounced on Dillon's doorstep, only to find that Dillon is as dangerous and seductive as she remembers. But despite his silky hostility, she discovers she can't leave. Things start disappearing, strange accidents begin to happen and Jamie doesn't know whether Dillon is trying to seduce her or scare her away. And if she gives in to his predatory games, will she lose her soul? Or her life?But something else–something evil and threatening–is going on. And Dillon knows more than he's saying. Is he the one behind the strange threats…or is he Jamie's only chance for survival?
She stayed in the shadows, silent, motionless, horrified. He saw her anyway, his head jerking up as he peered into the darkness.
“Who’s there?”
He wasn’t alone. The small figure of a man stood in the doorway, blocking the light from spreading out onto the little tableau. The man on the ground was groaning, cursing, but smart enough not to move. And Jamie wondered if she had time to run.
She wasn’t going to run, she reminded herself. She had a bad habit of running from trouble, and this was what she’d been determined to face.
She stepped out of the shadows, moving up to him. He wouldn’t know who she was, of course. He’d barely been aware of her back then, and he hadn’t seen her since that night so long ago, when both their lives had changed. She’d be the last person he expected to show up on his doorstep.
She was right about one thing. “What are you doing here?”
He knew exactly who she was. It was one shock on top of another, and she came out with the only answer she could muster. “I’m looking for answers.”
“Nate’s dead,” Dillon said, his voice as flat and expressionless as his eyes.
“I know that. I want to know why.”
Into the Fire
Anne Stuart
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
This one’s for Spike and Yoshiki.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
1
I t was a cold night in November, and the heater in her old Volvo had died forty miles back. Jamie stared straight ahead into the darkness, ignoring the warning lights on her dashboard, ignoring everything but her final destination. She’d put soothing New Age music on the CD player, but it hadn’t managed to calm her. She’d grown even more tense, trying to fight the soporific effects of the soft music, until her hands were numb from gripping the steering wheel.
What the hell was she doing here? Nate was dead, murdered three months ago—coming here wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t stop the pain.
She focused on the road, trying to stay alert after seventeen hours of driving. Nate was dead and no one could tell her what happened. He’d been found bludgeoned to death in an old garage in Cooperstown, Wisconsin, and no one seemed to give a damn. The police had given up after what had been only a cursory investigation. It was a drug deal gone wrong, they said. They had more important things to spend their time on. Three months had passed and everyone had forgotten.
Everyone but Jamie Kincaid and her mother. Nate had come into their family when he was ten years old, his own parents dead in a tragic fire, and he’d always been more of a brother than a cousin. More of a son to Isobel and Victor Kincaid than a nephew. Maybe even more of their own child than Jamie, it had seemed at times, but she always quashed that paranoid, disloyal thought. Her parents loved her, just as they loved Nate. Everyone loved charming, feckless Nate, with his glorious smile and easy charm. And he even looked like her parents, with his dark Kincaid good looks and brown eyes. A resemblance the paler, adopted Jamie had always lacked.
It didn’t matter, never had mattered to her. There was enough love in their small family to go around, no matter what disasters befell them. And disasters had followed Nate like a vengeful guardian angel. Ending in his own murder, a thousand miles from home, a thousand years away.
The police didn’t care. Isobel did. After she’d learned of his death, she’d sunk into a deep, angry depression, not eating, not leaving the house, mourning her lost nephew with a fierce, almost biblical passion. But both Isobel and Jamie needed answers before they could let him rest in peace. And after a bleak, broken Thanksgiving, Jamie had gotten in her old car and driven a thousand miles to get those answers.
If she’d thought twice about it she never would have left Marshfield, Rhode Island. The roads had been crowded with holiday travelers, rushing to and from warm family gatherings. Her car was on its last legs, barely reliable enough to get her to and from work at the small private school where she taught. It wasn’t up to heroic efforts, and it was telling her so.
The windshield wipers had stopped working hours before. Fortunately the rain had stopped, as well. She’d passed the Wisconsin state line hours ago, left the interstate to wander on the dark, wet roads outside the city. It seemed like the final indignity, to die in Wisconsin, Jamie thought. Nate was such a flamboyant, larger-than-life character—he should have died spectacularly. Not in some squalid room over top of a garage.
But Dillon Gaynor had seen to it that he had. Nate’s lifelong best friend, his nemesis, the person who’d dragged him into the gutter and held him down there. The man Nate had called Killer. Who might have lived up to his name three months ago.
The police had even taken him in for questioning. But they’d let him go. Never filed charges and simply closed the case when other, more important issues took their attention. And the question that haunted Jamie was simple. Had Dillon Gaynor gotten away with murder?
Sometime in western Pennsylvania she’d wondered what the hell she was doing, going after a man she knew was capable of killing. A man who’d scared the shit out of her when he’d been a teenage delinquent. She hadn’t seen him in twelve years—he hadn’t even bothered to come east for the memorial service for his oldest friend. Even if he hadn’t beat her cousin to death, he was still guilty. He’d kept Nate supplied with drugs, he’d taken him down the dark path that had ended in a sordid death. He was to blame, even if he hadn’t actually killed him. And she would have been happy never to see him again.
But by Ohio she’d stopped thinking about it. She needed answers, her desperately grieving mother needed them. And Dillon wouldn’t dare hurt her. He might be little better than pond scum, a high-school dropout with a record and an ongoing history of trouble with the law, but he was very, very smart. Almost frighteningly so. He’d be too smart to commit another murder and think he could get away with it.
She even had a plausible excuse for coming. Dillon was holding on to a box of Nate’s possessions, and despite Isobel’s increasingly virulent requests, he hadn’t bothered to send it back to them. God only knows what was inside—maybe the Patek Philippe watch that had been handed down through generations, maybe some clue to what happened. Or maybe dirty laundry and unpaid bills. It didn’t matter. Isobel was fixated on having anything that had ever belonged to Nate, and after that bleak Thanksgiving meal Jamie had agreed to go and get it.
Exhaustion set in by Indiana. She’d been surviving on black coffee and Ritz crackers, and the blinding headache was such a familiar companion that it almost felt like a friend. She tried turning off the New Age tape to listen to the radio, but all she could get was angry hip-hop or mournful country music. The classical music station put her to sleep, so she cracked the window and turned the New Age music back on. She gripped the steering wheel tightly.
Illinois had passed in a blur. She didn’t even mind Chicago driving, when she usually panicked over city traffic. It was late by then, the commuters were home in bed, and she sped through, half daring the police to stop her.
No one did. She was close now, within just a few miles of her destination. She had an address, she had a map, she had determination.
She also had a car on the verge of dying and a light snow that had begun to fall. She turned on the windshield wipers, forgetting that they were broken. The night seemed darker still on this narrow back road, the lights barely cutting through the darkness.
And then she realized it wasn’t her imagination, it wasn’t exhaustion. The lights were getting dimmer, the car was slowing, cruising to a sudden, coughing halt in the middle of the road. The New Age piano was still going, but it sounded like a warped record. And then even that stopped, and the last of the light gave up the ghost, and she was left sitting in the darkness.
Crying was an option, an appealing one, but she resisted. She hadn’t really cried since she’d heard that Nate had died. She was afraid that once she started she’d never stop.
She certainly wasn’t going to start crying right before she came face-to-face with Dillon Gaynor. She wouldn’t give him that pleasure.
She rolled down the window, put the car in Neutral and stepped onto the wet pavement. The car was on a slight rise, and she couldn’t leave it sitting in the middle of a road, even one as deserted as this.
Pushing a car onto the shoulder was a lot harder than it looked, even with the aid of a slope. And it was just about impossible to steer through the open window. God knows there was no stopping it when it began to roll, picked up speed and knocked her onto her knees on the pavement. She watched it slide off the road, ending up on its side against a copse of trees.
She flinched at the crunching sound. Volvos were strong—they could take a lot of punishment. Even a twelve-year-old one was tougher than a lot of new American cars. She’d get someone to tow it out tomorrow, fix it.
Hell, Dillon lived in an old garage. Maybe someone still worked there, and she’d kill two birds with one stone.
Her watch was an elegant antique, a family heirloom. It needed to be wound every day, having been made long before aquaglow was invented, and it had stopped hours ago. There was no way she could tell what time it was. It had to be after midnight, but that was as close as she could come. She hadn’t seen another car since she’d gotten off on this secondary road that led into the small mill city of Cooperstown. She had a choice—climb down the embankment, crawl into the back seat of her car and wait for morning. The snow had picked up a bit, but one night in below-freezing temperatures wouldn’t kill her.
And maybe she’d wake up in the morning stiff and sore, and think better of her impulsive trip. Maybe she’d rent a safer car, abandon the Volvo and drive straight back home. What did she think she could learn from a man like Dillon Gaynor? A man who always kept his secrets?
That wasn’t going to happen. She’d come too far, worked herself up to face him. She left her second thoughts back in Rhode Island. She wasn’t turning back now.
She’d been heading in the right direction—she was certain of that. Her only choice was to follow the empty road and hope that eventually she’d find what she was looking for. All she had to do was manage the snowy bank and grab her purse from the car without falling again.
In the end it was almost too easy. Her feet were numb, from the cold, from walking. She’d scraped her knee when she’d landed on the hard pavement, and her winter coat was back in Rhode Island, where the weather had been unseasonably balmy. She kept walking, huddled in a thick sweater that had seen better days, plowing forward through the slowly drifting snowflakes.
The building where Nate died sat alone on the edge of the run-down little town. She hadn’t even been able to find Cooperstown, Wisconsin, in the road atlas—it had taken the Internet to find a route. The place was little more than a ghost of an old industrial town, and the building itself looked as if it had once been some kind of factory back when this had been a viable community. Now it simply looked abandoned, and she would have walked on if she hadn’t seen the glimmer of light behind one of the filthy windows. And the sign by the door—Gaynor’s Auto Restoration.
After so many miles, so many hours, she simply stood outside the closed door, afraid to take the last step. She could hear voices, and a moment later the door opened, light and noise spilling out into the night as two men flew forward, locked in an embrace of fury.
She stumbled back, just in time, and the two ended up in the thin layer of snow, one on top as he methodically pounded his fist into the other man’s face with a casual violence that would have horrified Jamie at any other time. She hadn’t seen anyone hit someone in twelve years. And it had been the same man administering the beating. She knew it with a kind of sick fear.
He dropped the man back on the ground and rose. She could see blood on his fists, and he wiped them casually against his jeans. “Don’t come back,” he said.
It was the same voice. Huskier, but the same. Nate had been beaten to death, beyond recognition, in this very building. Maybe by those very hands.
She stayed in the shadows, silent, motionless, horrified. He saw her, anyway, his head jerking up as he peered into the darkness.
“Who’s there?”
He wasn’t alone. The small figure of a man stood in the doorway, blocking the light from spreading out onto the little tableau. The man on the ground was groaning, cursing, but smart enough not to move. And Jamie wondered if she had time to run.
She wasn’t going to, she reminded herself. She had a bad habit of running from trouble, and this was what she’d been determined to face.
She stepped out of the shadows, moving up to him. He wouldn’t know who she was, of course. He’d barely been aware of her back then, and he hadn’t seen her since that night so long ago, when both their lives had changed. She’d be the last person he expected to show up on his doorstep.
She was right about one thing. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
He knew exactly who she was. It was one shock on top of another, and she came out with the only answer she could muster. “I’m looking for answers.”
“Nate’s dead,” Dillon said, his voice as flat and expressionless as his eyes.
“I know that. I want to know why.”
He said nothing. He looked just as she remembered, and yet nothing like it at all. He stood with the light behind him, and she couldn’t see his face. She could only see the blood on his hands.
“Go home, Jamie,” he said after a long moment. “Go back to your safe little boarding-school world. There’s nothing for you here.”
She didn’t even stop to wonder how he knew that she taught in a boarding school. “I can’t. I promised my mother. We need answers.”
“Your mother,” Dillon said with a throaty laugh. “I should have known the Duchess would have something to do with this. I don’t give a shit what you and your goddamned mother want, I only care what I want. And that is for you to get in your car and get your scrawny little ass out of here before I lose my temper. I’m already in a bad mood, and you should remember that I’m not very nice when I’m in a bad mood.”
The notion was so absurd she found she could laugh. “You’re never very nice,” she said.
“True enough.” He glanced past her. “Where’s your car?”
“Broken down somewhere.”
“And I’m supposed to rescue you?”
“Aw, Dillon!” The man behind him spoke. “Let the poor girl in out of the cold. You’re scaring her.”
“Easy enough to do,” he said carelessly.
“C’mon, man. We’re finished our game, anyway. We can’t play two-handed, and I don’t think Tomas is going to be in any shape to play cards for a while.” He stepped out into the alleyway, a short, skinny little man, smaller than her own average height. He probably wouldn’t weigh more than one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. Less than she did. If there was one thing she didn’t possess, it was a scrawny ass.
“I’m Mouser,” he said. “And your name’s Janie?”
“Jamie,” Dillon corrected. “Jamie Kincaid. Nate’s sister.”
Mouser took an instinctive step back from her, looking rattled. “I didn’t know he had any sisters. I thought he hatched from a snake’s egg.”
“Cousin,” she said, startled. “We were brought up together.”
“Then you knew what he was like,” Mouser said, nodding. “Just ignore Dillon. He gets like this when someone cheats at cards, especially when they do it badly. It insults his intelligence. That’s why we’ve got Tomas over there in the mud. He’s not going to make you stand out here in the alleyway and freeze to death.”
“Who says?” But with that caustic remark Dillon moved back inside. Leaving the door open behind him.
“That’s as close to an invitation as you’re gonna get,” Mouser said. “Better get moving before he changes his mind and locks us both out in the snow.”
The room beyond the door was hot and smoky, and Mouser closed the door behind her, shutting out the cold. Shutting off escape.
The place was a mess. They’d been playing poker around an old table, and chips and cards lay scattered on the floor. Two chairs were overturned, bottles of beer lay spilled on the floor, and Dillon stood in the corner, smoking a cigarette and looking at her out of hooded eyes.
She stifled a cough. The room was a sty, but what else would she expect of someone like him?
“So you’re Nate’s sister,” Mouser said, getting a better look at her in the smoky light. “Not much of a resemblance, is there?”
“Cousin,” she corrected him again. “We were just brought up together. And I’m adopted.”
“Lucky you,” Mouser said obscurely. He glanced up at Dillon. “Maybe I’ll just leave you two together to relive old times.”
“Not likely,” Dillon said.
“Well, then, to work out your differences. Be nice to her, Killer. It’s not every day you have a pretty waif show up on your doorstep. Be a hero for a change,” Mouser said, his voice stern.
“Jamie’ll tell you that’s not in my nature. Scrape Tomas off the sidewalk on your way, will you? I don’t want any more complications tonight. She’s enough.”
“Will do. But I’m warning you, I expect to find her safe and happy next time I see her,” Mouser said.
“She’ll be safe enough,” he said. “I can’t be responsible for ‘happy.’”
“Funny, that’s not what your women say,” Mouser murmured.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, she’s not one of my women,” Dillon snapped.
“Oh, I noticed,” Mouser said in a cheerful voice.
“I notice everything. Don’t let him browbeat you, Jamie. He’s mostly bark and very little bite.”
That wasn’t what she remembered. But the door closed behind them, leaving the two of them alone in the smoky, trashed room.
He moved then, picking up the overturned chairs on his way to the sink. They were in a kitchen of sorts, with a microwave, a hot plate, a tin sink and an old refrigerator. Which would undoubtedly be filled with beer. The old oak table in the center of the room took up most of the space, and he had to come way too close to her to reach the sink. He made no effort to avoid her, and she had to stumble back, out of his way.
He was washing the blood off his knuckles, and she stared at his hands. They were big hands, strong, with a webbing of little nicks and scars. His knuckles were skinned—it hadn’t just been his victim’s blood. He didn’t seem to react to any pain—he just rinsed the blood off and dried the raw knuckles with a paper towel. He tossed it in the overflowing trash can by the sink, but it missed and floated down to the floor in a lazy, graceful swirl.
He turned then, leaning against the sink to look at her, letting his eyes run from the top of her head to her wet, aching feet.
It was very nice of Mouser to call her a pretty waif. She couldn’t disagree with the waif part, but “pretty” was pushing it. Particularly right now, when she hadn’t slept for two days, wore no makeup, and her pale brown hair straggled around her face. She’d never been Dillon’s type, thank God, even at her best, and at her worst she was definitely safe. If anyone could be safe around Dillon.
“You can spend the night,” he said abruptly. “It’s after three, and I’m not in the mood to haul your car out of a ditch. Tomorrow I’ll get someone to tow it here, I’ll fix it, and you can get the hell out of here.”
“You’ll fix it?” she repeated.
“I’m a grease monkey, remember? I can fix any car. I just don’t happen to have a tow truck. I count on other people to drag them to me.” He opened the fridge, but to her surprise she couldn’t see any beer. They must have drunk it all. “I suppose you came to collect Nate’s stuff. Fine with me—it’s been just taking up room.”
“Then why wouldn’t you send it?”
“Couldn’t be bothered.” He took a carton of milk, opened it and drank.
She wondered what he’d do if she fainted. She was tempted—she couldn’t remember the last time she ate, and after her long, cold walk she was too hot, dizzy, ready to collapse, and he hadn’t even offered her a chair. She should walk to the nearest one and sit, but for some reason she couldn’t move.
She realized he was looking at her again. His eyes were just as cold, just as blue as she remembered. “You look like shit,” he said.
“Thank you.”
He pushed away from the sink. “Come on. I don’t feel like carrying you upstairs if you pass out.”
He was more observant than she realized. There were at least three closed doors leading off the small kitchen. He opened one to reveal a dark, narrow flight of stairs.
He took them two at a time. She hauled herself up with the handrail, slowly, knowing he was waiting for her at the top of the stairs.
He didn’t move out of her way when she reached the second floor. He moved to take her arm, and she jerked away from him in sudden panic.
She could feel nothing beneath her—she was falling, and she was going to break her neck on these rickety stairs, and then what would her mother do, and what the hell did she care, and…
He caught her arm and yanked her back onto solid ground. “Are you trying to kill yourself?” he snapped.
He was very strong. Stronger than she remembered. She’d have bruises on her arm.
“You can let go of me now,” she said.
“And have you take a header down the stairs? I don’t think so.” He moved down the hallway, dragging her after him.
The bare lightbulb overhead did little to illuminate their way. The place smelled of gasoline and cooking and all sorts of other smells she didn’t even want to think about. He pushed open a door and pulled the string from overhead. The light didn’t come on.
“Shit,” he muttered. “Stay here.”
At least he let go of her. She stood in the hallway, waiting, while he disappeared behind another door. When he came back he was carrying a sleeping bag and a small lamp. He pushed past her into the room, and in a moment the light came on. He’d plugged it in and set it on the floor next to the mattress that lay there, the only thing in the small, bare, dismal room.
He tossed the sleeping bag on the mattress. “You’ll have to make do with that. The bathroom’s down the hall. You want something to sleep in?”
“I’ll keep my clothes on.”
His smile was cool and fleeting. “I’m sure you will. Go to sleep, Jamie. Tomorrow you’ll be safely on your way home.”
And before she could respond he closed the door, shutting her into the tiny, empty room.
Someone was there, in the huge old building. He knew it without seeing, without hearing. Knew that someone had finally come, to break him free from the stasis that had held him .
Was the newcomer afraid of ghosts? He didn’t want to scare whoever it was. Not yet, at least. First he had to see if they were of any use .
And if they’d help him kill Dillon Gaynor. He’d been waiting too long. It was time for Dillon to pay .
2
J amie found the bathroom, a mixed blessing given its condition. She never could figure out why men were such utter pigs—it must have something to do with that extra chromosome. The only towel in sight was a dismal shade of gray, so she simply used her hands to wash her face, then glanced up at her reflection.
Waif, was it? At twenty-eight years old Jamie Kincaid looked much as she’d always looked. Pale skin, gray eyes, hair an indiscriminate shade between brown and blond.
She pushed her hair away from her face, staring at her reflection thoughtfully. Good bones, good skin, even features. Nothing to write home about, but nothing to be ashamed of, either. She was never going to attract the kind of dangerous attention from the wrong kind of man. The only reason Dillon had known of her existence was because of her cousin. If it hadn’t been for Nate he never would have noticed well-behaved Jamie. They’d hardly run in the same crowd in high school.
If you could even say he’d been in high school. There had never been anyone at home to make sure he attended regularly. His mother had left when he was young, and his father had died in a drunken car crash when Dillon was sixteen. He’d dropped out just before graduation, and there’d been some story that had been effectively hushed up. Maybe he’d gotten someone pregnant, though that seemed a relatively mild offense. Beaten someone, been arrested? All she knew was that the school and her family were furious with him, Nate was amused, and Dillon, when she saw him from a distance, defiant.
He was still defiant. Living in this rattrap, living his marginal existence. It was probably the best he could manage with his alcohol and drug problems. The addictions hadn’t yet made their mark on his face. He still looked very much like he’d looked twelve years ago, with a few lines added for interest.
As if he needed anything to make him more interesting. Jamie shivered, turning away from the mirror. This was harder than she’d expected, and she’d expected it to be tough. Seeing him again brought all sorts of feelings back, unwelcome memories flooding through her mind, through her rebellious body. He made her feel young and vulnerable again, just by being there. She’d been a fool to come.
She’d leave, first thing tomorrow. As soon as her car was up and running. He wanted her out of there, and she wanted to go. She’d grab Nate’s things and take off. Dillon wasn’t going to give her the answers she needed. She should have remembered that much about him. He never gave up anything he didn’t want to.
No lock on her bedroom door, of course. Not that it would have made any difference—as far as she knew she was alone in this old building with Dillon, and he wouldn’t let anything as flimsy as a lock get in the way of what he wanted. And why in hell would he want her?
She shut the door, anyway, then picked up the lamp and held it over the mattress. It was thin, stained, but there was nothing crawling on it, and she was so bone tired she could weep. If she were in the habit of crying. She shook out the sleeping bag, unzipped it and crawled in.
And immediately scrambled back out in a panic, knocking the lamp over. It was an old down sleeping bag, and it smelled like Dillon. Like his skin, an ineffable scent that was unmistakable and disturbing. Almost…erotic. She couldn’t possibly sleep with that thing around her—it was like being wrapped in his embrace.
She sat on the thin mattress, shivering. There was no way she could attempt the long drive back home, no way she could escape without sleep. And no way she could sleep without some kind of cover.
She stretched back out on the mattress and pulled the sleeping bag over her. It settled against her like a silky cloud.
There was no escaping him, not that night. She’d chosen to walk straight into the lion’s den—she might as well accept it.
Tomorrow she’d be gone. Come to her senses. If her mother needed more answers she’d have to hire a private detective.
Nate was dead. Nothing would bring him back, and right now answers, justice, even revenge seemed too dangerous a quest. Maybe when she’d gotten some sleep she’d see things differently, but she didn’t think so. One look into Dillon Gaynor’s cold blue eyes reminded her of just how dangerous he could be. And she was a woman who valued safety.
She turned off the light, and the room was plunged into a thick, inky darkness, punctuated by a blinking neon sign somewhere beyond her window. He hadn’t given her a pillow, and there was no way she was going to go looking for one. She punched her sweater into a ball and put it under her head, pulling the sleeping bag up to her chin.
He was everywhere. Beneath her, above her, surrounding her. There was no fighting it, not now. She closed her eyes and remembered.
Twelve years ago
It was a beautiful late spring night in Rhode Island when Jamie Kincaid grew up. She was sixteen years old, privileged, beloved, living in a dream world with nothing more to worry about than grades and dates. Grades were no problem—as her cousin, Nate, always told her, she was too smart for her own good.
And dates weren’t usually an issue, either. She’d had a pleasant, nonthreatening boyfriend who’d done no more than give her a few closedmouthed kisses, and when he dumped her on the eve of the junior prom she was more annoyed than hurt. She had the dress, she’d worked on the committee, she had every intention of going, anyway, and dragooned her cousin Nate to take her.
Nate was more a brother than a cousin. He’d lived with his aunt Isobel and uncle Victor for the last nine years, since his parents had died in a fire. Jamie was an only child, and she’d always wanted an older brother. And ten-year-old Nate was a dream come true for young Jamie.
She still adored him, though nine years together had worn off some of the novelty. But then, everybody adored Nate—he was incredibly handsome, with a dazzling smile, dark eyes, silky black hair and the kind of rugged body that made him perfect for sports and teenage fantasies. He was beloved by teachers and students alike, his surrogate parents, and most especially by his besotted cousin, Jamie.
“What’s up, kitten?”
Jamie looked up from her spot on the floor. The pale pink prom dress billowed out around her, and she wondered if unshed tears made her makeup run. Being dumped wasn’t worth crying for. It was just…annoying.
She managed a crooked smile. Her cousin Nate hated emotions. With his easy charm he breezed through life, and he preferred those around him to do the same, and since Jamie adored him she did her best. “I just got dumped. Zack told me he was breaking up with me and taking Sara Jackson to the prom.”
Nate shook his head. “Great timing. I could have told you Zack was a loser. Want Dillon and me to go beat him up for you?”
Jamie controlled a little shiver. Her cousin was only kidding, but when it came to someone like his friend Dillon Gaynor there was no telling what might happen. “Don’t bother. I’ll get revenge sooner or later.”
“I suppose you still want to go to the prom? Forget it, precious! I may love you like a brother, but I’m not going to take you to a high school junior prom. I’ve already suffered through one once.”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t ask you. I’m not going.”
“So what are you going to do? Aunt Isobel and uncle Victor have already gone out, and I’ve got plans with Killer. Wanna come along?”
Killer was Nate’s affectionate name for his lowlife friend Dillon. Unfortunately there were times when Jamie wondered whether or not it was a bit too appropriate. “That’s all right. You don’t want a sixteen-year-old tagging along after you. I’ll be fine. There’s a book I want to read….”
“Nope,” Nate said flatly. “You aren’t going to miss out on your prom to curl up with a good book. You’re coming with us. Time to visit the wild side of life. See how the other half lives. Try a little danger.”
“I’m not big on danger.”
“Your big cousin will be there to protect you,” he said. “And Dillon will make sure nothing happens to you.”
“Like I trust him?” she scoffed.
“Trust who?” Dillon said, lounging in her doorway.
That was only one of the things she didn’t like about him. He always walked in, appearing out of the blue. He seemed to know when her parents were gone—Victor and Isobel Kincaid neither liked nor approved of Nate’s friend, and he was wise enough to make himself scarce when they were around. But anytime they were gone he’d be lounging in front of the big-screen TV, eating their food, smoking cigarettes, watching her out of his cool, insolent blue eyes. When he bothered to pay any attention to her at all.
“My little cousin thinks you’re a dangerous man,” Nate said with a laugh. He was a few inches shorter than Dillon, dark hair to Dillon’s bleached-blond shag, sunshine and good nature to Dillon’s mocking deference that always bordered on rudeness. It was no wonder her mother disliked him.
“She’s right,” Dillon said, looking down at her. “So are you ready?”
“I’m trying to talk Jamie into coming with us. She just got stood up, and I thought it was time to broaden her horizons.”
She half expected Dillon to object, but he simply looked at her and shrugged. “If you think she’s up to it.”
“She’s my biggest fan,” Nate said. “She’d never rat us out. Besides, Jamie can be your date since you don’t have one.”
“No!” Jamie said, her horror overriding her usual courtesy.
If anything, Dillon seemed more amused than offended. “I don’t need a date where we’re going. I think you’re asking for trouble here, Nate.”
Nate’s smile was wide, the kind that won over friend and foe alike, clouded men’s minds and women’s, too. “But you know I love trouble.” He reached out a hand to Jamie and pulled her to her feet.
“She’s not wearing that,” Dillon said.
“Killer, you are no fun at all,” Nate protested. “I think we should show up at Crazy Jack’s with my cousin the prom queen.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Jamie said nervously.
“Of course it is. Go change into something sexy. Dress like a bad girl for a change. Wouldn’t you like to be a bad girl, just once?”
“Not particularly.” She cast a wary glance up at Dillon. He tended to ignore her, and she’d probably exchanged maybe a dozen words with him in her entire life. “What do you think, Dillon? Should I come with you guys?”
She should have known she’d get no answer from him. “Suit yourself. Just hurry up.”
She was crazy to do it. Her parents only tolerated Dillon because of Nate, but there was no way they’d approve of her going out with them. Dillon came from the wrong side of the tracks, and his behavior befitted his upbringing. He’d already spent three months in juvie for stealing cars, and no one had any illusions that he’d changed his ways. He’d just gotten more careful.
Jamie could never understand what Nate saw in him. Maybe it was his to-hell-with-you attitude. Nate charmed everyone he came in contact with, needing their approval; Dillon didn’t care one way or another. He just did what he wanted and let the chips fall where they may.
And she was going out with him. Well, not with him, really. She was just tagging along with her cousin and Dillon and as soon as they got to Crazy Jack’s, wherever that was, he’d find someone to keep himself busy. Nate would look after her—she trusted him with her life.
The prom dress ripped slightly when she yanked it over her head. She tossed it in the corner, found a pair of jeans and a big white shirt. She buttoned it up high, just so Dillon didn’t get any ideas, and headed back out to the sound of their voices before she could change her mind.
They were in the kitchen drinking beer. Her father wouldn’t like that one bit—the boys were only nineteen and one of them would be driving. Dillon was to blame, of course. Maybe after tonight Jamie would have some kind of idea of what Nate saw in him. And if she did, maybe she’d help her parents figure out how to get Nate away from such a dangerous influence.
“That’s better, precious,” Nate said approvingly. Dillon said nothing, draining his beer.
“We’d better get going. Rachel will be pissed.”
“Who’s Rachel?” Jamie asked. Maybe Dillon had a girlfriend, after all. In fact, he was very good-looking. A polar opposite to her cousin, he was tall, blue-eyed, teenage skinny with endless legs. He had the best cheekbones she’d ever seen on a man, she had to admit that much. And the kind of mouth a susceptible girl might find attractive. If she liked danger.
“Never you mind about Rachel,” Nate said fondly. “She’s nothing serious. Just for fun.”
“Is she your date or Dillon’s?” she asked.
“Carry these.” Dillon shoved a six-pack of beer into her arms. “And you’ve forgotten. You’re my date for the night.”
She looked at him warily, not certain whether he was kidding or not. With Dillon you could never quite tell.
Her only choice was to ignore him. She wrapped her arms around the beer, hoping the white cotton of her shirt would disguise her bundle, and followed them out into the driveway.
It was a warm night in May. The peepers were in full voice, and there was a soft breeze ruffling through the bright green leaves overhead. The kind of night that always put an ache of longing in the pit of her stomach, though she never could quite figure out what she was longing for.
Dillon’s old car was parked in the driveway. There was no mistaking it—a very old yellow Cadillac convertible that he’d fixed up himself. It was fast and big, and he could outrun the police if he really wanted to. As far as Jamie knew, he’d never wanted to.
He’d always tinkered with cars. He’d been driving since he was thirteen, and she had no idea if he had a driver’s license even now. He went around to the driver’s side and climbed in, not bothering to open the door. Not bothering to open hers, either, of course.
She reached for the rear door, but Nate was ahead of her. “You sit in the front, kitten. I want the back seat for me and Rachel.”
He smiled at her, beguiling as always, and there was no way she could object.
“The doors don’t work,” Dillon said. “You’ll have to climb in. Hand me the beer.”
She hesitated. She could still go to the prom—there was no shame in going alone, and she had the dress. That stupid pink dress that she’d torn.
Safety or danger? Dillon was looking up at her, his cool blue eyes daring her. She climbed over the side of the car and slid down onto the worn leather seat of the Caddy, putting the beer beside her.
He took one, opened it and set it between his legs. Immediately drawing her attention to his crotch. She jerked her head away, staring straight forward. He wouldn’t notice the blush of color on her face. He wasn’t that interested.
He drove fast but well. He’d jury-rigged a cassette tape player into the dashboard, and he had it playing loud heavy-metal music. He finished one beer, tossed the can in the bushes and opened another, all without sparing a glance her way.
She had no idea where they were going, and the little shiver of excitement in the pit of her stomach mixed with fear as he turned down a dirt road, barely slowing the car. It sped along the rutted surface, moving deeper into the woods, until he finally came to a stop in a clearing. A battered old pickup truck was parked there, accompanied by a couple of rusting wrecks, and a narrow path led through the woods to a tumbledown building almost out of sight.
Nate had already jumped out of the back seat. “You guys stay here. I told Rachel to meet me at the house. I’ll just go get the stuff and be back in a minute.”
Dillon switched off the car, stretching out in the front seat. “Take your time,” he said lazily. “My date will keep me entertained.”
Was that excitement or dread in her stomach? Or a heady combination of both? “Maybe I should go with him…” she said nervously.
“I don’t think so. He and Rachel will want some privacy. He’ll be back eventually.”
“Eventually?” she echoed, and she could hear the panic in her own voice.
“Don’t look so terrified, sweet cakes. I don’t bite. Much.”
She was already as far from him on the wide front seat of the Cadillac as she could get. He reached between them, ripped another beer from the plastic ring and then set the remainder on the floor. Leaving nothing between them. “Have a beer,” he said. She wasn’t sure if it was an offer or an order.
“I don’t think…”
“I thought this was your big night of rebellion. Take the beer, Jamie.”
She took it. It wasn’t as if it was the first beer she’d ever had. She just didn’t like it much. However, she was so nervous her stomach was doing flip-flops, and maybe the beer would calm her down, help her to relax. She didn’t want Dillon thinking she was a total idiot. Though she didn’t even want to consider why his opinion suddenly mattered.
The beer was lukewarm, yeasty, and she took a long drink. Dillon lounged against the door, making no move toward her, watching her out of hooded eyes. “Nate will be bringing some more stuff if you’d prefer grass.”
“I don’t!” she said quickly.
“Just say no?” he mocked. “I bet you’re good at that, sweet cakes. I bet you say no all the time. Do you ever say yes?”
She didn’t answer, and he didn’t seem to expect her to. He leaned back against the seat, looking up into the darkening sky, totally relaxed, while Jamie sat miles away on the other side of the car, clutching her beer.
So he was every young girl’s secret fantasy, she mocked herself. Latter-day James Dean, bad boy with a killer smile and a mouth that could tempt a nun. And she was no nun.
“Do you want to make out?” she asked suddenly.
He turned to look at her, slowly, lazily. “Is that an offer?”
She squirmed, uncomfortable. “Well, if I’m really your date…”
“You’re not,” he said. “Much as I appreciate the offer of a virgin sacrifice, I think I’ll pass this time. I don’t make out.”
She took another swig of the beer. It was almost gone, and she wondered if he’d offer her another one. Probably not. “You don’t? Don’t you like girls?”
His smile was the most dangerous thing she’d ever seen in her life. “I like girls just fine. I don’t make out, I don’t neck, I don’t kiss as a recreational activity.”
“Then what do you do?”
“I fuck.”
Jamie choked on the last of her beer. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me. I fuck. I don’t kiss women unless I want to fuck them, and I sure as hell don’t kiss jailbait like you unless it’s a sure thing. And I don’t think you’re going to be slipping out of those jeans anytime soon, are you? Not for me.”
She just stared at him. Night was falling, and the breeze had picked up just slightly, running through his shaggy blond hair like a lover’s caress. “No,” she said in a small voice.
His smile was small and mocking. “I didn’t think so. Not from the way you’re hugging that side of the car. Don’t worry, baby girl. I won’t touch you.” He turned his head, peering through the gathering darkness. “It won’t be long now. Nate doesn’t have much staying power.”
“Staying power? What are you talking about?”
“He and Rachel are having sex. He goes for quantity rather than quality, and Rachel’s a good match for him. They’ll be out in a few more minutes, smelling of sex, half drunk with it. That, and the dope he went to get.”
“Whose house is that?”
“Mine.”
“Are they your drugs?”
“Yes.”
She was silent. She’d gone through all the mandatory drug-education classes, she knew the dangers. She’d been around marijuana enough to know the smell, to see people get giggly with it, then numbed out. “Are you a dealer?”
“Why? You looking to score?”
“No. I was just curious.”
“I think you ought to stifle that curiosity, sweet cakes,” he said. He glanced at his watch, a cheap Timex, and swore. “Maybe Nate’s being more creative than usual.” He looked over at her, considering. “Maybe I’ve changed my mind.”
“What?” It came out as a nervous little squeak.
“Come here.”
3
J amie woke up in the shadowy gloom, lost, disoriented, fighting back panic. There was a loud, roaring noise coming from somewhere, she was cold, her back hurt, and for a moment she had no idea where she was. The neon light flashed on again, illuminating the small room for a brief moment, and she remembered. And felt her panic increase.
She sat up, taking deep, calming breaths. She never liked sleeping in unfamiliar beds—one of the many reasons she’d driven straight to Wisconsin without stopping at a motel along the way. Even in the familiarity of her own bed she seldom slept well—the slightest sound would jar her awake and she would lie there, for hours on end, staring into the darkness.
At least this time she had a reason. The windowsill was eye level from her seat on the floor, and she looked out over the alleyway, into the dismal gray light of a November dawn. She had no idea how long she’d slept—it might have been hours, or minutes. The room was cold, and in the unforgiving light of day it looked like a cell. Though she could finally identify the roaring noise as heat pouring into the room from a vent near her mattress. At least this place came equipped with an extremely noisy furnace.
She lay back down again, closing her eyes. There was no use getting up—Dillon would be sleeping off the effects of whatever he’d had the night before, and he wouldn’t be in any shape to help her. Not that he’d be interested in doing anything for her—they’d never gotten along. But he’d be motivated to get her out of there, if for no other reason than he’d never liked her.
She shivered. It had never really left her—that haunted night so long ago. Months, even years, went by without her thinking about it, without remembering the painful embarrassment and shame, but one look into Dillon’s cold blue eyes had brought everything back, with a vengeance. The rough pleasure in his hands. The shattering misery of how it ended.
She took a slow, deep breath, willing her tense body to relax. Long ago, she reminded herself. And by the end of the night Dillon had been so wasted there was no way he could remember any details. If he even remembered that night at all.
She must have been out of her mind to think that she could come here unscathed. Though maybe that was part of the reason she’d come, jumped in her car before she thought better of it, taking off into the dark November night like an angel on a mission. She wanted answers about Nate’s death. But she needed to face Dillon Gaynor and put any lingering emotions to rest. To let go of the past before she could get on with her future. And like it or not, Dillon was part of her past, inextricably entwined with Nate.
She’d been wearing the same clothes for forty-eight hours, and she was feeling beyond grungy. As soon as she got away from here she’d stop at the first motel she found, take a two-hour shower and even try for a nap. And then drive straight back to Rhode Island, with no more answers than she’d had when she started on this idiot quest.
At least the room was warming up, and she could dispense with the sleeping bag. She shoved a hand through her tangled hair, scrambling off the thin mattress. And then she saw her suitcase.
She stared at it, not making the mistake of thinking it a good sign. If Dillon had managed to fix her car, then he wouldn’t have brought her suitcase up—he wouldn’t do anything to prolong her stay.
She opened the door to the long, narrow hallway. The bare lightbulb at the end illuminated the empty bathroom. All the other doors were closed, and she wondered where he slept.
Not that it mattered. At that moment the bathroom was looking pretty damned good, and a shower was becoming more and more appealing with the arrival of clean clothes. She wasn’t getting out of here until Dillon woke up and she was able to get Nate’s things, and there was no way she was going to sit around in these clothes for another minute.
At least there was a lock on the bathroom door. One of those old skeleton key things—if she’d had half a brain the night before she could have taken the key and locked her own door. And then Dillon couldn’t have come in the darkness to dump her suitcase. Had he stood there and stared at her while she slept? Doubtful.
The bathtub was a grimy, claw-footed antique with a shower overhead, but the water was hot and the grayish towels smelled clean. She combed her wet hair with her fingers and grimaced at her reflection. She’d thrown T-shirts and jeans in her suitcase instead of her usual professional clothes. She looked like a twelve-year-old, with her scrubbed, makeup-free face, wet hair and boy’s clothes. Any other twenty-eight-year-old woman would be happy to look so young. For Jamie it just reminded her of when she was sixteen and Dillon Gaynor was the terrifying center of her universe.
She’d had all sorts of fantasies about what it would be like if or when she saw him again. She’d be cool, calm, mature, with perfect hair and makeup, maybe a subdued suit and the string of pearls her parents had given her. The person she was raised to be.
Instead she’d shown up at his doorstep like a snowy waif. And he wasn’t going to look at her today and see the calm, professional woman she’d become. He’d see a kid, and he’d remember.
Maybe. Or maybe that night was just a blur, along with a thousand other nights. Maybe he didn’t remember.
But the problem was, she did.
The hall was still dark and silent, all the doors closed. She dumped her dirty clothes in a corner in her room, then glanced outside. It was getting lighter—maybe seven o’clock in the morning. She had two choices: wait for Dillon to get over his hangover and drag himself out of bed, or go down and start taking care of things on her own. It was a no-brainer. She needed to find out where her car was, get it towed, call Isobel, find some coffee, find something to eat….
The stairway was narrow and dark, and if there were any lights she couldn’t find them. She went down carefully, holding on to the rickety railing, feeling her way in the shadows. She got to the bottom, reaching for the door into the kitchen, when she stepped on something soft and squishy. Something big.
She screamed, falling back in the shadows, and then immediately she felt stupid. It was probably nothing, just a discarded piece of clothing….
The door to the kitchen was yanked open, and Dillon stood there, filling it, radiating impatience. “What the hell are you yowling about?” he demanded. “Did you fall?”
“I—I stepped on something,” she said, trying to control her stammer. “It was probably nothing….” She glanced down at the small square of floor at the bottom of the stairs. She gulped. “Or maybe not.”
“It’s a rat,” Dillon said, his voice as flat as his expression. “We get them every now and then.”
“You have rats?” she demanded in horror.
“Sorry, princess, but this ain’t the Taj Mahal. It’s an old warehouse, and rats come with the territory. They show up occasionally, but at least they’re dead. Someone must have put some rat poison behind the walls years ago and it’s still working. Every now and then there’s a nice fresh corpse, and I don’t have to worry about them getting into the food.”
Food, Jamie thought. She glanced down at the dead rat, but even a corpse wasn’t enough to distract her. “I’m hungry,” she said.
“Then go on into the kitchen and find yourself something to eat. Unless you were thinking of fried rat?”
She rose from her seat on the stairs and glared at him. Two steps up put her eye level with him, and the result was disconcerting. “Maybe you could move the rat first? I don’t want to step on it.”
Big mistake. Before she knew what he was doing he’d simply picked her up, swung her across the small square of floor and set her down in the kitchen. Letting go of her immediately, as if she weren’t any more appealing than the dead rat. Maybe less. “There you go, Your Highness. There’s bread on the counter and beer in the fridge.”
“Or course there is,” she said, hostile. “But I’m not in the habit of drinking beer for breakfast.”
“You oughtta try it. Good for what ails you.”
“Nothing ails me.”
“Nothing but that stick up your ass,” Dillon said pleasantly, picking the rat up by the tail. It swung limply from his hand, and she shuddered.
“I’ll save the beer for you,” she said, controlling her shudder.
“Good of you.” He carried the rat over to the back door, opened it and flung it out into the alleyway. “All taken care of,” he said.
“You’re just going to leave it out there? Spreading disease and God knows what else?”
“The bubonic plague is over. And if it comes back I’m willing to bet you’d be happy to have me get the first case.”
“You got me there.”
He seemed to consider the idea for a moment. “Besides, there are enough scavengers around that he won’t be there for long. He’ll either be eaten by his brothers or carried off by some stray dog.”
“What makes you think it’s a he?”
“That was for your benefit. I assumed you think all rats are male.”
“Good point,” she said. The kitchen didn’t look much better than it had last night. The bottles had been swept off the table, but the smell of cigarettes and stale beer lingered in the air, with the faint note of exhaust beneath it.
“Bread’s on the counter,” he said. “I’ll make coffee.”
There were exactly two pieces of bread in the plastic bag, both of them heels. “Where’s the toaster?”
“Broken. There’s some peanut butter over the stove—make yourself a sandwich.”
Isobel would have fainted with shock at the idea of peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast. Jamie was just grateful for the protein. She sat down at the scarred oak table to make her sandwich, watching as Dillon reached for the coffeepot. He poured out the dregs, filled the carafe with water and put it back in the machine.
“Aren’t you going to wash it out first?”
“Why? It’s going to hold coffee, and that’s what it held before. What’s the big deal?” He leaned against the counter, watching her lazily.
“The old coffee oils will make it bitter,” she said, not even getting to the cleanliness part. From the look of Dillon’s littered kitchen, cleanliness wasn’t high on his list.
“Maybe I like bitter.”
“I have no doubt that you do,” she said. The bread was slightly stale, but it was solid, and she devoured her makeshift sandwich. “I don’t suppose you have anything as mundane as a soda?”
“They call it pop out here in the hinterlands, Your Highness. Check in the fridge.”
He’d been lying about the beer. They must have finished it all during their late-night poker game. The contents of the refrigerator consisted of a chunk of moldy cheese, half a quart of milk and enough cans of soda to satisfy anyone. She grabbed a Coke and shut the door, snapping the top and taking a long drink, letting the sugary caffeine bubble down her throat.
He was watching her, an unreadable expression on his face. Not that she’d ever been able to guess what he was thinking. “What?” she demanded irritably.
“You don’t strike me as the type who’d drink straight from the can.”
“Maybe I don’t trust your idea of cleanliness.”
“I’m sure it’s not up to your standards.”
“It’s not. When did you get my suitcase? Is my car here?”
“Your car’s still stuck in a ditch out on the highway. And I didn’t get the suitcase. Mouser was running an errand for me and he stopped and got it. You made quite an impression on him, but then, he doesn’t know you as well as I do.”
“You don’t know me at all. We haven’t seen each other in twelve years, and back then you had nothing to do with me.”
“That’s not the way I remember it.”
It felt as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. She didn’t even blink. “And your memory is so clear after all these years?”
“Clear enough.” She wondered if she was imagining the faint thread of menace beneath his smooth tone. Probably not.
“I need to call my mother.”
“Why?”
“To tell her I got here safely. And to tell her I’ll be leaving as soon as the car is ready. This afternoon, I hope.”
“Hope away,” he said. “Mouser said your car was pretty messed up.”
“This is a garage, isn’t it? I’ll pay you to fix it.”
“I work on old American cars, not imports. Different tools.”
“Then I’ll call Triple A. If they can find someone to fix it I’ll stay in a motel until it’s ready—otherwise I’ll rent a car.”
“Honey, this town is the armpit of despair. The only motel around rents rooms by the hour, not the night, and no one rents cars but me.”
“So?”
He glanced at her. “So I don’t rent cars to drive out of state. No way to get them back.”
“I’d think you’d be motivated to get me out of here.”
“Now, that’s where you’re wrong,” he said lazily, reaching for the coffeepot, which was now filled with thick black sludge. “I think I’m going to enjoy reliving old times. The halcyon days of my youth and all that.”
“Your youth wasn’t particularly halcyon.”
“Neither was yours, princess.”
“That’s not the way I remember it. I had two loving parents, a secure life, I had Nate as my brother and best friend. Until you got your hooks into him.”
He took a chair at the table, reaching for his cigarettes. It seemed like years since she’d been around anyone who smoked, and she watched with fascination as he lit the cigarette with a flip of his silver lighter. “Memories can be faulty,” he said, and blew smoke at her.
She would have liked to summon up a hacking cough, but in fact she’d never been particularly sensitive to smoke. Besides, he was clearly trying to bother her, and she wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. “Maybe yours are. I think I’m a little clearer on details than you would be.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Where’s the telephone?”
“In the garage. It’s a pay phone—be sure you have plenty of quarters.”
“How do you manage to do business without a phone?”
“I don’t like people intruding on my privacy.”
“Then I’ll be doing my best to get the hell out of here. Just find me Nate’s stuff and I’ll give AAA a call.”
“What’s the hurry, princess? Nate’s been dead for three months—he’s not going anywhere.”
“Don’t you even care?” she demanded. “He was your best friend! A brother to you, and he died when he was under your roof. Don’t you feel anything? Grief, regret, responsibility?”
“I’m not responsible for Nate’s death,” he said in a detached voice.
“I didn’t say you were. But you’re the one who should have protected him. If he’d gotten in with a bad crowd you should have done something, anything, to help him….” Her voice trailed off in the face of his ironic expression.
“Maybe you better make those phone calls,” he said, rising and pouring himself a mug of steaming sludge. “You want any of this?”
“I’d rather die.”
“Sooner or later, angel face, you’re going to have to learn to lower your patrician standards.”
“You aren’t going to be around to see it.”
“Oh, that’s where you’re wrong. I’m looking forward to it.”
The smell of the coffee was tantalizing. She knew it would be awful—too strong, too bitter. It would wreak havoc on her stomach and her nerves, and even milk and sugar wouldn’t make it palatable. And she wanted it, anyway.
She rose, shoving a hand through her wet hair. He was watching her, and she didn’t like it. The sooner she was out of there the better. “So my car’s still in the ditch on…what road did you say it was?”
“Route 31.”
“Fine. I’ll call AAA, I’ll call my mother, and I’ll make arrangements to give you back your privacy as soon as possible. That’s what you’d like, right? Have me get the hell out of here?”
“Do you have any doubts about that?” He stubbed out his cigarette, looking up at her above the thread of smoke.
In fact, she did. It didn’t make sense, but he didn’t seem in any hurry to have her leave. “I’ll just go get my purse. Maybe my cell phone will work here.”
“Maybe,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee and not even grimacing. “But I wouldn’t count on it. I wouldn’t count on anything if I were you.”
She didn’t bother arguing with him. She didn’t bother wasting another word on him—she simply headed up the dark, narrow stairs, stepping over the stained spot where the rat’s corpse had rested, going straight to her room.
In the gray light of a November morning it looked even less welcoming than it had before. The room was Spartan—just the mattress on the floor, the sleeping bag and her suitcase.
And no sign of her purse anywhere.
It was cold up here. Nate never thought he would be so cold, looking down on them. It was an odd sort of feeling—floating, dreamy, and then everything coming into focus. He should have known she was coming—he just couldn’t understand what had taken her so long to get here. His death would have shattered her, and there was no way she could move on with her life without getting answers. She’d come here to face his old buddy Dillon. The man who had let him die .
He wasn’t sure what he was going to do about it yet, even though he’d had a long time to think about it. Time had stopped making any sense, one day blending into another. He was trapped in this old building, unable to leave, but he’d heard her moving around, and known it was her .
The dead rat had been a nice touch. He left one every few days, not on a regular schedule. He didn’t want to be too predictable. He hadn’t expected Jamie to be the one to find it, but he didn’t mind. It meant Dillon had to come up with explanations, fast. And if he knew Dillon, he wasn’t about to tell her that the old factory was haunted by the ghost of her murdered cousin .
No, infested by rats was a preferable explanation. And it was. The rat of a man who’d betrayed his best friend and sent him to his death. And the King Rat himself, Nate Kincaid .
You can’t keep a good man down .
4
J amie searched, of course. It had been there when she woke up, hadn’t it? Dillon couldn’t have taken it—he’d been with her the entire time. And there was no way up to the second floor except that dark, rat-infested stairway, and no one had passed them while they sat arguing at the kitchen table.
Or maybe whoever had dumped her suitcase in the room had taken the purse. She wasn’t carrying a lot of cash, though her small supply of sleeping pills might appeal to some teenage druggie. And hell, what was Dillon but an overgrown teenage druggie? It had to be him.
She sat down on the mattress. She should go downstairs and confront him, demand that he return her purse. He’d deny taking it, of course. She was going to have a hell of a hard time getting out of here without her license and credit cards. No one would rent her a car, much less a room, without ID and credit. If he didn’t give it back to her she was stuck.
She stretched out on the thin mattress, staring at the cracked ceiling. He didn’t want her here. Why the hell would he do something that would keep her trapped here? Why, when he’d never liked her? If he even remembered that night so long ago, all he’d remember was what an idiot she’d been. What an embarrassing, pathetic idiot.
Twelve years ago
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said, and the soft breeze of early summer riffled through his too-long hair. “Come here.”
Jamie sat frozen in the front seat of the old Cadillac, practically wedged between the seat and the door. The beer bottle in her hands was empty, and in the gathering dusk Dillon Gaynor looked like every good girl’s worst nightmare. And secret, shameful dream.
She’d had her share of them. They all had, all the good girls of Marshfield, Rhode Island. He was wicked, he was sexy, he was as pretty as sin. Just the sort to daydream about. Just the sort to keep away from. And she was sitting in the front seat of an old Cadillac convertible with him, alone in the woods, and she’d been fool enough to bring up the subject of kissing.
She didn’t move. “I was just kidding,” she said, unable to keep the thread of nerves out of her voice.
“I wasn’t.” He took the empty beer bottle out of her hands and threw it into the woods. And then he reached for her, pulling her across the broad front seat. The old leather was so soft and smooth she slid easily, until she was touching him, thigh to thigh, and he was looking down into her breathless face. “So where do we start?”
“You drive me home, then come back and get Nate and his girlfriend?” she suggested in a nervous voice.
“I don’t think so.” He picked up her hand and looked at it for a long, contemplative moment. “Baby-pink nail polish. Did that match your prom dress?”
She’d chosen the shade just for that purpose, but she wasn’t about to admit it. He wasn’t expecting her to. He just held her delicate hand in his large, callused one, rubbing his thumb over her palm, slowly, sinuously. “Such an innocent hand,” he said. “What naughty things have you done with it?”
“Nothing.”
“I can believe it,” he murmured, pulling her hand to his mouth. He put his mouth against her palm, and she felt a shiver run through her body. And then he licked it, and the feel of his tongue against her skin shocked her. “Time you learned,” he said. And he put her hand against his chest.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been wearing the usual ratty T-shirt. But tonight he wore a faded Hawaiian-style shirt, and it was partly open, and her damp palm was pressed against his warm flesh without the safety of thin cotton between them.
He was hot. His skin burned beneath her cold hand, and she could feel the slow, steady pulse of his heart, beating against her palm, moving down her arm and into her body, so that her heart was beating with his, but faster, much faster, and she was cold where he was hot, and she stared up at him, paralyzed.
He kept her hand captured in his, pressed against his heart, as he leaned forward and flicked on the car radio. U2 was playing—Bono was singing about sex and love, just what she didn’t want to hear. He leaned back in the seat again, his fingers touching hers, caressing them, one by one, as he slowly unbuttoned the rest of his shirt with his other hand.
She felt like a small white rat facing a hungry python. Mesmerized, she sat in the front seat of the old convertible and waited for him to make the next move.
This was Dillon Gaynor, the object of her teenage fantasies since the first time he’d walked into her parents’ house, whether she’d wanted to admit it or not. It was his skin beneath her hand, and he was moving his head closer, and he was going to kiss her, he actually was, and she closed her eyes, holding her breath, waiting.
He tasted like beer. And cigarettes. And sin, sweet sin. The baddest of all bad boys, and he was kissing her, his mouth moving slowly over her closed lips, his hand pressing hers against his hot skin, holding it there. She closed her eyes, telling herself this wasn’t happening, and since it wasn’t, she wasn’t doing anything wrong or dangerous, and she could just lean back against the ratty leather seat and let him kiss her. He lifted his head.
“Is that the way you kiss your boyfriends?”
The nice dreamlike haze vanished, and she opened her eyes, trying to sit up. He held her down. “I know there’ve been boyfriends,” he continued, and she realized he was moving her hand across his stomach, in slow, erotic circles. “Nate’s told me all about them. Jimmy McCarty and Jay Thompson. You have lousy taste in boys.”
“Is that why I’m here with you?” she said.
“Kitten’s got claws,” he murmured. “Open your mouth when I kiss you.”
“I don’t like that.”
“Tough. You’re playing with grown-ups now. This is how we do it in the big leagues.” He pushed her back against the seat and forced her mouth open before she could come up with another protest. He kissed her, using his tongue, slowly, thoroughly, and she felt a heat begin to pool in her stomach, radiating outward. Dillon Gaynor definitely knew how to kiss. What had been wet and sloppy with Jimmy was slow and mesmerizing with Dillon. She hadn’t even realized he’d released her hand, and she was slowly caressing the warm skin of his stomach, until she felt his hand on the waist of her jeans, heard the rasp of her zipper as his hand slipped inside.
She panicked. It didn’t do her any good, he was too strong for her. His mouth silenced any protest, his body pressing against hers kept her from escaping, and his hands, his fingers, slid beneath her plain cotton panties to touch her.
She had the strength to wrench her mouth away from his. “Stop it,” she whispered. “Let me go.” She could have screamed, maybe. But she didn’t want to.
He pushed her face against his shoulder, his mouth by her ear, and he took a small, wicked bite of her earlobe. “Just relax,” he said. “Consider this a graduation present.”
“But I didn’t graduate,” she murmured in a dazed voice.
“You’re about to.”
One of her hands was trapped beneath their bodies, but she wrenched the other free to grab his shoulder and try to push him away. He didn’t budge.
“Close your eyes, baby girl,” he whispered. “I’m about to show you a very good time.”
There was nothing she could do to stop him—he was too strong, too determined, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He pushed his fingers inside her, and she wanted to die of shame. And he was rubbing her, using his thumb, and she knew what he was trying to do, but she couldn’t even do it on her own, much less with a stranger touching her, inside her, rubbing her until she moaned.
“That’s right, sweetheart,” he whispered. “That’s what I want to hear from you. Just a little bit louder.”
She bit her lip to keep from making any sound, but it didn’t do any good. She felt a spasm of reaction wash over her, and she shivered, her voice choked.
“Better,” he murmured. “But I think I want to make you cry.”
“Dillon,” she said in a cracked voice. Begged, though she wasn’t sure what she was begging for.
But Dillon knew. He knew exactly what he was doing to her, how to make her shiver and teeter on the very precipice, and then draw back, only to bring her forward again, stronger than ever, and she wanted to weep.
“Come on, baby girl,” he whispered in her ear. “Let go. Stop fighting me, stop fighting it. Come for me.”
She didn’t have any choice. It washed over her like an explosive force, as her body arched, rigid, and she wanted to scream, to cry, to make it stop, to make it last forever. It was too powerful, too overwhelming, and she let out a low, keening cry that he swallowed with his mouth, keeping her silent as he prolonged her orgasm past human endurance.
And then she collapsed beneath him, in a boneless, quivering heap, lying against his strong body in the front seat of the old Caddy, shaken and tearful.
He pulled his hand free and fastened her jeans again, pulling up the zipper and snapping the snap with experienced ease. Her face was wet with tears, but at least it was too dark for him to see, until she felt his fingers wiping them away in the darkness.
“What’s going on in there?” Nate’s slurred voice rang out in the darkness. “Are you corrupting my little cousin, Killer?”
“Of course not,” he said in a lazy voice, pushing her down on the seat, out of sight. “I tried to talk her into it but she’s too prim and proper. She just got tired of waiting for you and Rachel.”
“Sorry, kiddo,” Nate said in a careless voice. She couldn’t see anything from her vantage point on the cracked leather seat of the old Caddy, but it sounded as if it was just as well. Nate and his girlfriend climbed into the back seat, and she could smell the sickly sweet scent of marijuana permeating the air, mixing with the smell of liquor. Not the beer that Dillon had been drinking, something stronger.
“Drive on, Jeeves!” Nate ordered in a lordly manner.
Without a word Dillon started the car, the headlights spearing the darkness. It had to be late—the sky stayed light till almost ten that time of year. Would her parents wonder where she was when they got back from their cocktail party? No, they’d assume she was at the prom, safe in the care of a good boy who’d look out for her and keep her safe.
But that good boy had dumped her. And even her beloved Nate was doing a piss-poor job of seeing to her welfare, leaving her in the hands of a…a…she couldn’t even think of the word for Dillon.
She tried to sit up, but Dillon simply put a hand on her shoulder and shoved her down again. “You need your rest,” he said, pushing her head down to rest on one hard thigh. She couldn’t have sat up if she tried, but then she heard the telltale sounds from the back seat and realized that Nate and his girlfriend were doing more than necking. And she definitely didn’t want to be seeing that.
She stopped resisting, letting her head fall against the soft denim that covered Dillon’s leg. “That’s right,” he murmured, so quietly that the two in the back couldn’t hear him. Not that they were paying attention. “Just stay put and you won’t see anything you don’t want to see.”
Dillon had pulled out of the parking area and was driving down the tree-shrouded back road, fast, with one hand holding the steering wheel, the other draped casually on her shoulder. He was stroking her, absentmindedly, she assumed, his long fingers brushing against her arm, trailing up the side of her neck to brush her hair away. She had no illusions that he’d let her sit up—every time she tried he simply exerted enough pressure to keep her down. She gave up fighting, letting out her breath and letting her head rest on his thigh.
“That’s better,” he said, softly enough that the words were torn away by the wind rushing past them. And she closed her eyes, breathing in the night air, the smell of beer and denim and spring flowers. The scent of her on his hand as he slowly stroked her neck.
She almost fell asleep. She could hear the noises from the back seat, but she didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to think about what Dillon had done to her. Didn’t want think about anything but the quiet sense of calm that surrounded her as Dillon stroked her neck.
She heard the music first, echoing through the woods, loud and insistent. Dillon pulled the car to a stop, and this time when she tried to sit up he let her, let her scurry over to the far side of the car, while he showed nothing more than a faint smile.
At least Nate and his friend had resurfaced, flushed, half dressed, but finished with whatever they were doing. Nate scrambled out of the car, leaving his girlfriend to follow after him, but he paused to give Jamie a hand. A good thing, too, because her legs were still shaky. People surged around them, all of them strangers, most of them drunk or stoned, and she turned back to look for Dillon.
He already had his tongue down the throat of some girl who’d plastered herself against him. Except that he was holding on to her, holding her hips against his, and she’d already managed to unfasten the final buttons of his shirt. The shirt he’d unbuttoned for her.
She knew she hadn’t made a sound, but he broke the kiss for a moment, turning back to glance at Jamie. She couldn’t read his expression, and she knew she must have looked totally pathetic. “Hey, Pauly,” he said to somebody standing nearby. “Nate brought his little sister along. Look after her, will you?”
She didn’t even bother to correct him. Nate had already disappeared into the crowd, and Dillon had his hand on the huge breast of the girl who’d greeted him so enthusiastically. Totally forgetting about her.
“Hey, there, Jamie.” And she realized with a shock who Pauly was. Paul Jameson, quarterback of the football team, president of the student council, tall, gorgeous, every girl’s dream. He was slightly drunk, and his dark hair was flopped over his forehead in an endearing tangle. “Wanna drink?” He had a bottle of tequila in his hand.
She looked back toward Dillon, but he’d disappeared, without a backward glance. “Sure,” she said. And he handed her the bottle.
Jamie wasn’t accomplishing a goddamned thing, remembering that night. She’d put it out of her mind long ago, with a combination of determination, a good therapist and the judicious use of tranquilizers. Whenever the memories hit her she usually just popped a pill and the clawing anxiety would pass.
But the pills were in her purse, and her purse was gone. And the couldn’t spend the day in her room, hiding.
She sat up, then froze in horror. The door was open, and Dillon was standing in the darkened hallway, watching her, that same unreadable expression on his face. He was so different from the boy in the Cadillac all those years ago. He was exactly the same.
“Someone took my purse,” she said.
He looked neither surprised nor shocked. “Did you leave it in the car?”
“No. I brought it up here. Someone came into my room and took it.” She wasn’t certain of her ability to get to her feet with complete grace, so she stayed where she was, sitting on the thin mattress.
“And you think it was me? Not likely, sweetheart. I have no particular interest in keeping you around here, and the lack of your purse is going to slow your departure considerably. I know you like to blame me for everything that’s ever gone wrong in your and Nate’s life, but this time I’m innocent.”
“For some reason the very notion of you being innocent of anything is beyond my comprehension. And don’t call me sweetheart!” There was no question that Dillon brought out the worst in her. She’d spent her life trying to be compassionate, calm and forgiving, and Dillon made her shake with anger.
“What do you prefer I call you? Baby girl?”
It was like a punch in the stomach. He hadn’t forgotten that night. She didn’t even have that small comfort. At least he’d been too out of it to remember details.
She ignored it. “So if you didn’t take my purse, who did? The dead rat? Nate’s ghost?”
“You never can tell.” He made no effort to come into the room, but it was little comfort. He still loomed over her, and she decided it was better to scramble to her feet and risk looking clumsy than to keep staring up at him from such a subservient position. She knew enough about body language and politics to know this was only making her sense of powerlessness worse.
She got to her feet without stumbling, and even took a step toward him, just to show that she wasn’t afraid of him. “Where did you say the telephone was?” she said. “I need to call my mother and have her wire me some money.”
“Down in the garage. But you’ll have to call collect, princess.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You have to have more than a pay phone here!”
He shook his head. “No need. There aren’t that many people I want to talk to.”
“Or who want to talk to you?”
“You got it. You shouldn’t have any trouble finding it. I’m going to take a shower.”
“I’d appreciate the privacy.”
“Whereas I couldn’t care less. If you have any interest in joining me in the shower—”
“I don’t!” He was saying it just to annoy her, but it worked, to her utter shame.
“Give the Duchess my love, then,” Dillon said lazily. And he closed the door behind him.
He was lying to her. Nate hovered overhead in a dreamlike state. He’d always been a good liar, and he could recognize when his old friend was lying, as well. What did Dillon want with jamie? Maybe what he’d always wanted with Jamie and had never admitted .
It didn’t mean that Nate didn’t know just how fixated Dillon Gaynor had always been with little Jamie. And now she was here, stuck in the old building with no one to play chaperone but the ghost of the one person they had in common .
He was going to enjoy this .
5
A t least he’d left the door open to the kitchen, so that light filtered into the bottom of the stairwell. There’d be no dead rats beneath her bare feet this time, thank God. Just the live one upstairs in the shower.
Jamie didn’t want to think about that. Dillon and a shower meant Dillon naked, and that was one image she could happily do without. The only mental image she wanted of Dillon was with his head on a platter.
No, she didn’t even care that much, she reminded herself as she crossed the now surprisingly neat kitchen. She just wanted to be gone. To take Nate’s few possessions and get the hell out of there. Dillon unsettled her, even after all these years. Unsettled her more than the unanswered questions about Nate’s death. She’d loved her cousin, deeply, but in the last few years she’d lost most of her illusions about him. Nate was a bad boy, maybe almost as bad as Dillon Gaynor. He’d done drugs, he’d broken the law, he’d broken her mother’s heart. With his charm and good looks he’d managed to talk himself out of the consequences for his bad behavior. Until at the end, when someone, maybe even his childhood friend, had had enough and killed him.
Nothing was going to bring him back. Nothing would make the loss of him less painful, not the truth, not revenge. In fact, they’d lost Nate long ago. He needed to rest in peace.
But her mother wasn’t about to accept that simple truth, and Jamie would have done anything Isobel asked of her. Except that this time it was too much, and she needed to get the hell out of there.
She dreaded going into the garage to use the pay phone but she had no choice. “Why in heaven’s name are you calling me collect, Jamie?” she greeted her in the faint, slightly querulous tone she’d taken to using in the last few years. “You have a cell phone and a phone card.”
“I’ve lost my purse,” Jamie said flatly. And then guilt hit her. “How are you feeling, Mother?”
“The same,” Isobel said with a sigh. “What can one expect? How did you happen to lose your purse? Where are you, for that matter? Have you seen that man?”
Jamie had no doubts that “that man” was Dillon. “I’m here in Wisconsin. At his garage. My car went off the road, I lost my purse, and I need to get home.”
“How unfortunate,” Isobel said in her faint voice. “And a bit careless of you. How long have you been there?”
Jamie took a deep breath. “Twelve hours. Twelve hours too long. I need you to wire me some money, and any form of identification of mine you can find. Bella can look for you. She could even call the motor vehicle department to see what I need to do about my driver’s license. I can’t rent a car without one, even if I have a credit card.”
“I try not to ask my nurse to do personal favors for me,” Isobel said stiffly. “She’s got enough to do, taking care of an old woman in a wheelchair.”
Jamie pounded her forehead against the wall beside the pay phone, just once. Isobel never missed a chance to use her crippling arthritis as a weapon. “I don’t think Bella would mind in an emergency,” Jamie said.
“I don’t see that it’s an emergency. You’re staying with Dillon, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then that’s perfect. Your cousin died there, Jamie. Our Nate was murdered there, and now you have the perfect chance to find out what happened.”
“I’m not Nancy Drew, Mother.”
“Don’t be flippant with me,” Isobel said in her faint tones. “You care just as much as I do—you can’t fool me. A few days there won’t do you any harm. I’ll call my lawyer and have him put something in motion to get your paperwork back for you, but in the meantime you stay put and pay attention. Nothing happens without a reason. I think fate must have wanted you there.”
Jamie didn’t bother arguing. She loved her mother dearly, but Isobel did tend to think fate worked at Isobel Kincaid’s whim. She was a Kincaid, after all, twice over. She’d even married her second cousin Victor, and Nate used to say she’d done it just to keep the name.
“I really don’t want…” she tried one more time, but Isobel sailed right over her, her voice uncharacteristically strong.
“I don’t think your wants should be paramount right now, Jamie. I’ll call Miss Finch’s—I’m sure they can make do without you for a few days. In the meantime you should concentrate on what happened to Nate. Why he was even there, what he did during his last days. Anything.”
That tone of desperation had slid into Isobel’s voice, the one that always destroyed Jamie’s defenses. “All right, Mother,” she said wearily. “I’ll give it a few days.”
“Thank you, Jamie. I knew I could count on you. After all, we both loved him so much.”
“Yes, we did,” Jamie said. “Let me give you…”
“Goodbye, darling.”
“…the telephone number here.” But Isobel had already hung up. Jamie stared at the phone in frustration. She could always try calling her back, but knowing Isobel’s gift for getting what she wanted, she probably wouldn’t answer the phone. Either that or she’d refuse to accept the collect charges.
She was trapped. She resisted temptation, putting the telephone back into its cradle very carefully. Her mother was right—a couple of days wouldn’t kill her. And surely she could do something herself about getting her license and credit cards back. If only Dillon had a goddamned private telephone line.
She headed back toward the kitchen, then paused, looking at the cavernous garage.
It must have been some kind of warehouse or factory in the distant past. The place was huge, with a line of cars along both ends, half of them covered with tarps. She recognized an old Thunderbird, a Mustang Cobra and a stately ’49 Oldsmobile. For some reason she had always been good at recognizing cars, and the ones she could see in Dillon’s garage were beautiful and rare.
There were two more in various stages of disarray. The one missing an engine was a Ford from 1954 or 1955. The other was nothing less than a Duesenberg.
She took a step, irresistibly drawn to it. It had taken the years with surprising dignity, and even in its current state it had a certain grace and elegance that filled her with a rare covetousness. She’d never been particularly materialistic—her needs had always been more emotional and elemental. But looking at the old Duesenberg, she wanted it.
She turned her back on it, resolutely, and stalked to the kitchen. There was no sign of Dillon, thank God, and she was hungry. It was no wonder the man was still skinny—there wasn’t even enough food in his cupboards to feed the dead rat. She half expected to find pellets all over the place, but whatever rodents had taken possession of the kitchen had left no sign behind.
She gave up looking, starting to eat stale Wheaties from the box, when the door opened and a very small guardian angel stepped in. Or more specifically, Mouser, with a boxful of groceries.
“Hi, there, sugar,” he greeted her. “I brought you some food. Dillon never has a damned thing in the house, and I figured you’d be starving about now. Don’t eat those Wheaties—I think the guy on the box was in the 1936 Olympics.”
She set the box down hurriedly, swallowing her last dry mouthful. The little man was unpacking milk, orange juice and a bakery box that smelled like divine intervention.
“Cinnamon buns, no nuts, right?” he said.
She’d already opened the box, but she jerked her head up at his words. “How did you know that’s what I like?” she demanded sharply.
Mouser shrugged. “Nate musta said something. I got a good memory for things like that.”
“But Nate didn’t. I don’t think he had any idea whether I liked nuts or not.”
“Well, hell, I musta got you mixed up with someone else. I’ll get them with nuts tomorrow,” he said, unabashed.
“No, this is perfect,” she said hurriedly, realizing she must have sounded rude. Isobel had drummed good manners into her, good manners above all things. Besides, what did it matter if someone knew she didn’t like nuts on anything?
“And some decent coffee,” Mouser added, setting a tall cardboard mug in front of her. “Dillon uses the stuff he makes to strip the rust off old car parts.”
“I’d resent that if I didn’t know you’d brought me some, too,” Dillon said from the open doorway.
Jamie turned at the sound of his voice, and then quickly looked away. He was shirtless, his long hair wet, his feet bare. She should have known he’d look even better than he had at eighteen, the glorious golden bad boy of Marshfield, Rhode Island. She took the top off her cup of coffee, and the scent of hazelnut wafted up, as tempting as…tempting.
“Hey, I’m a sucker,” Mouser said, sitting down at the table and opening the box of cinnamon buns. “Aren’t you going to work today?”
“I was planning to.” Before he took a chair beside her he put his shirt on, but didn’t bother to button it. And his feet were still bare. “Hand over my coffee.” Dillon took a big gulp from the paper cup Mouser handed him, then looked at it in horror. “What is this shit?” he demanded.
“Hazelnut coffee. I thought it was time to broaden your horizons.”
“My coffee horizons are just fine as they are,” Dillon said, grimacing as he took another deep drink. “Now, if you want to talk about something more interesting, like a ’49 Studebaker, then—”
“I need to get out of here!” Jamie broke in.
Dillon turned to look at her, as if he’d just realized she was there. “And I’d like to get rid of you,” he said affably. “The perfect partnership. What do you expect me to do?”
“My purse is gone.”
“So you said. Call the Duchess and have her wire you what you need.”
“I did. She says she will. Eventually. In the meantime she wants me to stay here.”
She’d managed to surprise him. “The Duchess wants you in my evil clutches? Any reason why she’d choose you to be the virgin sacrifice?”
Virgin sacrifice . The phrase should have been light, comical. But it held too many loaded memories. For her, not for him. The years of alcohol and drugs had probably blotted out unpleasant memories for Dillon Gaynor. Sooner or later it would begin to show on his face. Right now he just looked older, sexier. His mouth was just as tempting as it had always been. It had tasted of cigarettes and beer, she remembered vividly. Even after all this time, no matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t forget Dillon’s taste.
“What are you staring at?” he said, reaching for the pack of cigarettes on the table.
Mouser slapped his hand. “I thought you were trying to quit.”
“I am. But not at this particularly stressful time in my life. I’ll wait till I don’t have guests,” he said, lighting one. “You didn’t answer my question. Why does the Duchess want you here?”
“She wants me to find out what happened to Nate.”
“He died.”
The knowledge still hurt, but she wasn’t about to show it. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
He took a deep drag of the cigarette, his eyes narrowed over the exhaled smoke. “I could tell you a lot of things you don’t know, child. There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded.
“It means that even if I told you, showed you, you wouldn’t believe it. You’ve set up your own belief system long ago, and nothing could ever shake it. Not that it should. You can go back to Rhode Island and live in your safe little cocoon. Didn’t you ever want to leave there?” he added with a swift change of topic.
“Not particularly.” It was a lie, but he wouldn’t know that. She felt stifled in the small college town where she’d spent her entire life. Anything, even a run-down garage in the middle of nowhere, would have been preferable.
“So what’s needed to get you the hell out of here?” he said, reaching for the last cinnamon bun. It wasn’t until that moment that Jamie realized she’d eaten the other three, out of sheer nervousness.
“My purse with all my credit cards and identification, for one thing.”
“I haven’t seen it,” Dillon said flatly. “What about you, Mouser? Did you run off with the lady’s purse?”
“Not me, Killer,” Mouser protested, absolutely innocent.
Jamie was about to finish her coffee, but she set it back down with a steady hand. “Why do they still call you that?” she asked.
He shrugged, stubbing out the half-finished cigarette. “Maybe I deserve it. Or maybe my fame follows me wherever I go. So no one knows where you left your purse. What do we do next?”
“I need to have my car working, and I need enough money to pay for gas to get me back to the East Coast.”
“Little enough to ask, and I’d be more than happy to pay you off to get you out of here. But your car’s been towed to a place across town, and Mick isn’t sure when he can get to it. And it’s against the law to drive without your license on you.”
“I’ll risk it,” she said dryly. “Besides, when did you ever care about what’s legal and what’s not?”
He shrugged again. “Just thinking of your lilywhite reputation, Ms. Kincaid. Accept it—the car’s out of reach for the time being. You can stay until it’s fixed, or you can come up with another solution.”
“Like what? I need money. I need my credit cards. I need my cell phone and my driver’s license. I can’t rent a car or buy an airplane ticket without a credit card and proper identification.”
“Then I guess you’re shit out of luck,” he said mildly. “And I’m doomed to have an unwanted guest for the next few days. Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. Mick’s an old friend, and if he knows we’ll end up killing each other if you don’t get out of here he’ll put a rush on it. In the meantime, you’re going to have to sit back and put up with me. But then, you’re good at enduring, aren’t you? You’ve had to put up with the Duchess all your life.”
“Stop calling her that! I love my mother.”
“Of course you do. Even though she doted on Nate and barely noticed you were alive. You’re a glutton for punishment, Jamie.”
“Not anymore,” she snapped, pushing away from the table. “I don’t suppose you have a car I could drive?”
“None of my beauties. They’re worth too much to risk in the hands of an unlicensed driver,” he said in a lazy voice.
“You know I really hate you, don’t you?”
“I believe you’ve mentioned it before. As long as your mother’s whispering in your ear I wouldn’t expect you to change your mind.”
She was already at the door. “Would you want me to change my mind?”
She’d managed to startle him. He paused, clearly giving it some reflection. “It might prove interesting.”
She slammed the door behind her.
The sound of it was satisfying. The bite of the winter air wasn’t. She’d gone storming out with nothing but a sweatshirt and a pair of sneakers, and the snow was at least three inches deep on the ground.
She turned back to look at the door. There was no way she could walk back in there, not after her grand exit. She was going to have to stand out there in the cold for at least a half an hour, and in that time she’d probably develop pneumonia, which would solve everything. She’d go into the hospital, or Dillon would creep into her room at night and open the windows over her fevered, prostrate body to hurry her along. And she wasn’t quite sure which of those options was preferable.
She was shivering, her body racked with cold, when the door behind her opened. She should have stomped off, but Dillon’s garage was in a particularly unsavory part of an unsavory town, and even in broad daylight she didn’t feel too safe exploring.
She didn’t turn, keeping her back rigid, trying to control the shivers. He could apologize until he was blue in the face. Though actually she was the one who was turning blue.
“He’s gone into the garage to work,” Mouser said. “Come in before you freeze your…freeze to death.”
She turned to look at the little man. “Dillon is an asshole,” she said flatly.
Mouser’s wizened face creased in a smile. “Can’t argue with you on that one. He’s always been a difficult son of a bitch. Doesn’t mean you need to catch your death of cold. Because if you get sick while you’re here I don’t think he’s going to be bringing you chicken soup and aspirin. He’s not exactly the nurturing type, is he?”
“Not exactly,” Jamie said, following him into the kitchen and closing the door behind her. It was warm, blessedly warm, and she rubbed her hands together to try to bring some life back.
“You’re as stubborn as he is, aren’t you?” Mouser said. “That’s going to be trouble.”
“No, it’s not. I’m going to get out of here and never see him again. I don’t know what his problem is—you can’t tell me he couldn’t come up with a car I could use and a hundred bucks to cover gas.”
“I wouldn’t tell you that Dillon couldn’t do anything. He’s very resourceful. Must be he doesn’t want to help you.”
“I can believe that. But I’d think getting rid of me would be more important than his dislike of me.”
Mouser’s smile exposed a set of startlingly perfect teeth. Undoubtedly dentures. “You think he dislikes you?”
“Of course. He dislikes me just as much as I dislike him,” Jamie said flatly.
“Well, if you put it that way, that’s a possibility,” Mouser said in a dry voice. “But bottom line, Jamie, is that I’ve known him well for the last five years, and I know what he thinks about things. And in your case, dislike doesn’t have much to do with it.”
“Okay, hatred,” Jamie supplied.
Mouser shook his head. “Not exactly. You’ll have a chance to figure it out in the next few days, both of you. It’ll be a good thing. Too much unfinished business between the two of you.”
“What makes you think that?” Jamie demanded. “I can’t believe he’s ever even mentioned me. Even thought of me in the last five years.”
“You forget, Nate was here. You were mentioned. Why don’t you ask Killer about it. He just might tell you.” Mouser was shrugging into his heavy jacket, preparing to head out into the icy Wisconsin weather.
“You think I won’t?” Jamie said. “I’m here for answers.”
“Good for you. And if you pay attention, maybe he’ll give them to you. If you really want them.”
And he closed the door gently behind him, leaving Jamie alone in the kitchen. Wondering if she really did want all the answers, after all.
He could smell the cinnamon and hazelnut floating up toward him. Funny, he’d forgotten what it was like to eat, to feel warm, to touch, but his sense of smell was still powerful. He could recognize the smell of Killer’s shampoo, he could tell when Jamie was moving far beneath him. Trapped as he was, he could feel everything, smell everything, know everything. Except how to escape .
Unfinished business, isn’t that the sort of thing that kept ghosts tied to a place? Nate had unfinished business, and as soon as he figured out what it was, he’d be able to leave.
It might be as simple as killing Dillon. Or getting someone to do it. Or maybe he had to be finished with Jamie, as well. A murder-suicide pact would be perfect, but highly unlikely. Unless Jamie could be persuaded to shoot Dillon.
It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. Anything could happen, and there was a lot of history between them. They were just as haunted by the past as they were by his shadowy presence.
It still waited to be seen which of the two would prove the stronger. And the more destructive.
6
J amie considered herself riddled with flaws, but cowardice wasn’t one of them. Yes, she wanted to get the hell out of there rather than confront the past and the possibly unpalatable truth about Nate, but fate, or her mother, had decreed otherwise. She was stuck here for at least a couple of days, and she wasn’t going to spend that time avoiding Dillon. Besides, the bigger a pain in the butt she was, the more motivated he’d be to help her leave.
She shoved her hair back from her face and straightened to her full height. She was too short, almost a foot shorter than Dillon, and she always thought that he would have been easier to deal with if he didn’t tower over her. He thought he could bury his head inside a car engine and ignore her, but she was about to disabuse him of that notion. She was going to be a total pest until she got out of there.
She opened the door to the cavernous garage and was immediately assaulted by noise, a vast rumbling that had been almost completely muffled. She closed the door behind her and began to sort through the cacophony. The rush of white noise was actually some kind of space heater, spewing hot air into the vast expanse of the room. The music was loud, too, Nirvana, Jamie suspected, though she’d never been that fond of the group. But Dillon had always favored the raw-pain sound of Kurt Cobain.
Beneath it all was the rumble and roar of a car engine, punctuated with the steady sound of a hammer on metal. And then a stream of curses as Dillon emerged from beneath the hood of the Duesenberg.
She’d half hoped to watch him for a bit without him realizing she was there, but he honed right in on her, his eyes narrowing. It was too loud to do anything other than shout, and Dillon wasn’t about to bother raising his voice. He simply disappeared back beneath the hood of the old car, leaving Jamie with two choices. She could go back into the kitchen and wait. Or she could go over there and make him talk to her.
The kitchen option sounded immensely appealing, but Jamie was made of sterner stuff than that. She wasn’t about to turn off the heat—her sojourn in the alleyway still hadn’t worn off completely—but she could put a stop to the cacophony blaring from the huge stereo system.
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Anne Stuart
A year ago Jamie learned that her beloved cousin, Nate, had been killed. Beaten to death in what police suspect was a drug deal gone wrong, he was found by his childhood friend Dillon Gaynor.Dillon had always been the baddest of the bad boys, leading Nate astray, and Jamie knows he has the answers to her questions about Nate's death. He's not about to volunteer any information, and Jamie's only choice is to head to the Wisconsin town where he lives to find the answers for herself.Jamie shows up unannounced on Dillon's doorstep, only to find that Dillon is as dangerous and seductive as she remembers. But despite his silky hostility, she discovers she can't leave. Things start disappearing, strange accidents begin to happen and Jamie doesn't know whether Dillon is trying to seduce her or scare her away. And if she gives in to his predatory games, will she lose her soul? Or her life?But something else–something evil and threatening–is going on. And Dillon knows more than he's saying. Is he the one behind the strange threats…or is he Jamie's only chance for survival?
She stayed in the shadows, silent, motionless, horrified. He saw her anyway, his head jerking up as he peered into the darkness.
“Who’s there?”
He wasn’t alone. The small figure of a man stood in the doorway, blocking the light from spreading out onto the little tableau. The man on the ground was groaning, cursing, but smart enough not to move. And Jamie wondered if she had time to run.
She wasn’t going to run, she reminded herself. She had a bad habit of running from trouble, and this was what she’d been determined to face.
She stepped out of the shadows, moving up to him. He wouldn’t know who she was, of course. He’d barely been aware of her back then, and he hadn’t seen her since that night so long ago, when both their lives had changed. She’d be the last person he expected to show up on his doorstep.
She was right about one thing. “What are you doing here?”
He knew exactly who she was. It was one shock on top of another, and she came out with the only answer she could muster. “I’m looking for answers.”
“Nate’s dead,” Dillon said, his voice as flat and expressionless as his eyes.
“I know that. I want to know why.”
Into the Fire
Anne Stuart
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
This one’s for Spike and Yoshiki.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
1
I t was a cold night in November, and the heater in her old Volvo had died forty miles back. Jamie stared straight ahead into the darkness, ignoring the warning lights on her dashboard, ignoring everything but her final destination. She’d put soothing New Age music on the CD player, but it hadn’t managed to calm her. She’d grown even more tense, trying to fight the soporific effects of the soft music, until her hands were numb from gripping the steering wheel.
What the hell was she doing here? Nate was dead, murdered three months ago—coming here wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t stop the pain.
She focused on the road, trying to stay alert after seventeen hours of driving. Nate was dead and no one could tell her what happened. He’d been found bludgeoned to death in an old garage in Cooperstown, Wisconsin, and no one seemed to give a damn. The police had given up after what had been only a cursory investigation. It was a drug deal gone wrong, they said. They had more important things to spend their time on. Three months had passed and everyone had forgotten.
Everyone but Jamie Kincaid and her mother. Nate had come into their family when he was ten years old, his own parents dead in a tragic fire, and he’d always been more of a brother than a cousin. More of a son to Isobel and Victor Kincaid than a nephew. Maybe even more of their own child than Jamie, it had seemed at times, but she always quashed that paranoid, disloyal thought. Her parents loved her, just as they loved Nate. Everyone loved charming, feckless Nate, with his glorious smile and easy charm. And he even looked like her parents, with his dark Kincaid good looks and brown eyes. A resemblance the paler, adopted Jamie had always lacked.
It didn’t matter, never had mattered to her. There was enough love in their small family to go around, no matter what disasters befell them. And disasters had followed Nate like a vengeful guardian angel. Ending in his own murder, a thousand miles from home, a thousand years away.
The police didn’t care. Isobel did. After she’d learned of his death, she’d sunk into a deep, angry depression, not eating, not leaving the house, mourning her lost nephew with a fierce, almost biblical passion. But both Isobel and Jamie needed answers before they could let him rest in peace. And after a bleak, broken Thanksgiving, Jamie had gotten in her old car and driven a thousand miles to get those answers.
If she’d thought twice about it she never would have left Marshfield, Rhode Island. The roads had been crowded with holiday travelers, rushing to and from warm family gatherings. Her car was on its last legs, barely reliable enough to get her to and from work at the small private school where she taught. It wasn’t up to heroic efforts, and it was telling her so.
The windshield wipers had stopped working hours before. Fortunately the rain had stopped, as well. She’d passed the Wisconsin state line hours ago, left the interstate to wander on the dark, wet roads outside the city. It seemed like the final indignity, to die in Wisconsin, Jamie thought. Nate was such a flamboyant, larger-than-life character—he should have died spectacularly. Not in some squalid room over top of a garage.
But Dillon Gaynor had seen to it that he had. Nate’s lifelong best friend, his nemesis, the person who’d dragged him into the gutter and held him down there. The man Nate had called Killer. Who might have lived up to his name three months ago.
The police had even taken him in for questioning. But they’d let him go. Never filed charges and simply closed the case when other, more important issues took their attention. And the question that haunted Jamie was simple. Had Dillon Gaynor gotten away with murder?
Sometime in western Pennsylvania she’d wondered what the hell she was doing, going after a man she knew was capable of killing. A man who’d scared the shit out of her when he’d been a teenage delinquent. She hadn’t seen him in twelve years—he hadn’t even bothered to come east for the memorial service for his oldest friend. Even if he hadn’t beat her cousin to death, he was still guilty. He’d kept Nate supplied with drugs, he’d taken him down the dark path that had ended in a sordid death. He was to blame, even if he hadn’t actually killed him. And she would have been happy never to see him again.
But by Ohio she’d stopped thinking about it. She needed answers, her desperately grieving mother needed them. And Dillon wouldn’t dare hurt her. He might be little better than pond scum, a high-school dropout with a record and an ongoing history of trouble with the law, but he was very, very smart. Almost frighteningly so. He’d be too smart to commit another murder and think he could get away with it.
She even had a plausible excuse for coming. Dillon was holding on to a box of Nate’s possessions, and despite Isobel’s increasingly virulent requests, he hadn’t bothered to send it back to them. God only knows what was inside—maybe the Patek Philippe watch that had been handed down through generations, maybe some clue to what happened. Or maybe dirty laundry and unpaid bills. It didn’t matter. Isobel was fixated on having anything that had ever belonged to Nate, and after that bleak Thanksgiving meal Jamie had agreed to go and get it.
Exhaustion set in by Indiana. She’d been surviving on black coffee and Ritz crackers, and the blinding headache was such a familiar companion that it almost felt like a friend. She tried turning off the New Age tape to listen to the radio, but all she could get was angry hip-hop or mournful country music. The classical music station put her to sleep, so she cracked the window and turned the New Age music back on. She gripped the steering wheel tightly.
Illinois had passed in a blur. She didn’t even mind Chicago driving, when she usually panicked over city traffic. It was late by then, the commuters were home in bed, and she sped through, half daring the police to stop her.
No one did. She was close now, within just a few miles of her destination. She had an address, she had a map, she had determination.
She also had a car on the verge of dying and a light snow that had begun to fall. She turned on the windshield wipers, forgetting that they were broken. The night seemed darker still on this narrow back road, the lights barely cutting through the darkness.
And then she realized it wasn’t her imagination, it wasn’t exhaustion. The lights were getting dimmer, the car was slowing, cruising to a sudden, coughing halt in the middle of the road. The New Age piano was still going, but it sounded like a warped record. And then even that stopped, and the last of the light gave up the ghost, and she was left sitting in the darkness.
Crying was an option, an appealing one, but she resisted. She hadn’t really cried since she’d heard that Nate had died. She was afraid that once she started she’d never stop.
She certainly wasn’t going to start crying right before she came face-to-face with Dillon Gaynor. She wouldn’t give him that pleasure.
She rolled down the window, put the car in Neutral and stepped onto the wet pavement. The car was on a slight rise, and she couldn’t leave it sitting in the middle of a road, even one as deserted as this.
Pushing a car onto the shoulder was a lot harder than it looked, even with the aid of a slope. And it was just about impossible to steer through the open window. God knows there was no stopping it when it began to roll, picked up speed and knocked her onto her knees on the pavement. She watched it slide off the road, ending up on its side against a copse of trees.
She flinched at the crunching sound. Volvos were strong—they could take a lot of punishment. Even a twelve-year-old one was tougher than a lot of new American cars. She’d get someone to tow it out tomorrow, fix it.
Hell, Dillon lived in an old garage. Maybe someone still worked there, and she’d kill two birds with one stone.
Her watch was an elegant antique, a family heirloom. It needed to be wound every day, having been made long before aquaglow was invented, and it had stopped hours ago. There was no way she could tell what time it was. It had to be after midnight, but that was as close as she could come. She hadn’t seen another car since she’d gotten off on this secondary road that led into the small mill city of Cooperstown. She had a choice—climb down the embankment, crawl into the back seat of her car and wait for morning. The snow had picked up a bit, but one night in below-freezing temperatures wouldn’t kill her.
And maybe she’d wake up in the morning stiff and sore, and think better of her impulsive trip. Maybe she’d rent a safer car, abandon the Volvo and drive straight back home. What did she think she could learn from a man like Dillon Gaynor? A man who always kept his secrets?
That wasn’t going to happen. She’d come too far, worked herself up to face him. She left her second thoughts back in Rhode Island. She wasn’t turning back now.
She’d been heading in the right direction—she was certain of that. Her only choice was to follow the empty road and hope that eventually she’d find what she was looking for. All she had to do was manage the snowy bank and grab her purse from the car without falling again.
In the end it was almost too easy. Her feet were numb, from the cold, from walking. She’d scraped her knee when she’d landed on the hard pavement, and her winter coat was back in Rhode Island, where the weather had been unseasonably balmy. She kept walking, huddled in a thick sweater that had seen better days, plowing forward through the slowly drifting snowflakes.
The building where Nate died sat alone on the edge of the run-down little town. She hadn’t even been able to find Cooperstown, Wisconsin, in the road atlas—it had taken the Internet to find a route. The place was little more than a ghost of an old industrial town, and the building itself looked as if it had once been some kind of factory back when this had been a viable community. Now it simply looked abandoned, and she would have walked on if she hadn’t seen the glimmer of light behind one of the filthy windows. And the sign by the door—Gaynor’s Auto Restoration.
After so many miles, so many hours, she simply stood outside the closed door, afraid to take the last step. She could hear voices, and a moment later the door opened, light and noise spilling out into the night as two men flew forward, locked in an embrace of fury.
She stumbled back, just in time, and the two ended up in the thin layer of snow, one on top as he methodically pounded his fist into the other man’s face with a casual violence that would have horrified Jamie at any other time. She hadn’t seen anyone hit someone in twelve years. And it had been the same man administering the beating. She knew it with a kind of sick fear.
He dropped the man back on the ground and rose. She could see blood on his fists, and he wiped them casually against his jeans. “Don’t come back,” he said.
It was the same voice. Huskier, but the same. Nate had been beaten to death, beyond recognition, in this very building. Maybe by those very hands.
She stayed in the shadows, silent, motionless, horrified. He saw her, anyway, his head jerking up as he peered into the darkness.
“Who’s there?”
He wasn’t alone. The small figure of a man stood in the doorway, blocking the light from spreading out onto the little tableau. The man on the ground was groaning, cursing, but smart enough not to move. And Jamie wondered if she had time to run.
She wasn’t going to, she reminded herself. She had a bad habit of running from trouble, and this was what she’d been determined to face.
She stepped out of the shadows, moving up to him. He wouldn’t know who she was, of course. He’d barely been aware of her back then, and he hadn’t seen her since that night so long ago, when both their lives had changed. She’d be the last person he expected to show up on his doorstep.
She was right about one thing. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
He knew exactly who she was. It was one shock on top of another, and she came out with the only answer she could muster. “I’m looking for answers.”
“Nate’s dead,” Dillon said, his voice as flat and expressionless as his eyes.
“I know that. I want to know why.”
He said nothing. He looked just as she remembered, and yet nothing like it at all. He stood with the light behind him, and she couldn’t see his face. She could only see the blood on his hands.
“Go home, Jamie,” he said after a long moment. “Go back to your safe little boarding-school world. There’s nothing for you here.”
She didn’t even stop to wonder how he knew that she taught in a boarding school. “I can’t. I promised my mother. We need answers.”
“Your mother,” Dillon said with a throaty laugh. “I should have known the Duchess would have something to do with this. I don’t give a shit what you and your goddamned mother want, I only care what I want. And that is for you to get in your car and get your scrawny little ass out of here before I lose my temper. I’m already in a bad mood, and you should remember that I’m not very nice when I’m in a bad mood.”
The notion was so absurd she found she could laugh. “You’re never very nice,” she said.
“True enough.” He glanced past her. “Where’s your car?”
“Broken down somewhere.”
“And I’m supposed to rescue you?”
“Aw, Dillon!” The man behind him spoke. “Let the poor girl in out of the cold. You’re scaring her.”
“Easy enough to do,” he said carelessly.
“C’mon, man. We’re finished our game, anyway. We can’t play two-handed, and I don’t think Tomas is going to be in any shape to play cards for a while.” He stepped out into the alleyway, a short, skinny little man, smaller than her own average height. He probably wouldn’t weigh more than one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. Less than she did. If there was one thing she didn’t possess, it was a scrawny ass.
“I’m Mouser,” he said. “And your name’s Janie?”
“Jamie,” Dillon corrected. “Jamie Kincaid. Nate’s sister.”
Mouser took an instinctive step back from her, looking rattled. “I didn’t know he had any sisters. I thought he hatched from a snake’s egg.”
“Cousin,” she said, startled. “We were brought up together.”
“Then you knew what he was like,” Mouser said, nodding. “Just ignore Dillon. He gets like this when someone cheats at cards, especially when they do it badly. It insults his intelligence. That’s why we’ve got Tomas over there in the mud. He’s not going to make you stand out here in the alleyway and freeze to death.”
“Who says?” But with that caustic remark Dillon moved back inside. Leaving the door open behind him.
“That’s as close to an invitation as you’re gonna get,” Mouser said. “Better get moving before he changes his mind and locks us both out in the snow.”
The room beyond the door was hot and smoky, and Mouser closed the door behind her, shutting out the cold. Shutting off escape.
The place was a mess. They’d been playing poker around an old table, and chips and cards lay scattered on the floor. Two chairs were overturned, bottles of beer lay spilled on the floor, and Dillon stood in the corner, smoking a cigarette and looking at her out of hooded eyes.
She stifled a cough. The room was a sty, but what else would she expect of someone like him?
“So you’re Nate’s sister,” Mouser said, getting a better look at her in the smoky light. “Not much of a resemblance, is there?”
“Cousin,” she corrected him again. “We were just brought up together. And I’m adopted.”
“Lucky you,” Mouser said obscurely. He glanced up at Dillon. “Maybe I’ll just leave you two together to relive old times.”
“Not likely,” Dillon said.
“Well, then, to work out your differences. Be nice to her, Killer. It’s not every day you have a pretty waif show up on your doorstep. Be a hero for a change,” Mouser said, his voice stern.
“Jamie’ll tell you that’s not in my nature. Scrape Tomas off the sidewalk on your way, will you? I don’t want any more complications tonight. She’s enough.”
“Will do. But I’m warning you, I expect to find her safe and happy next time I see her,” Mouser said.
“She’ll be safe enough,” he said. “I can’t be responsible for ‘happy.’”
“Funny, that’s not what your women say,” Mouser murmured.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, she’s not one of my women,” Dillon snapped.
“Oh, I noticed,” Mouser said in a cheerful voice.
“I notice everything. Don’t let him browbeat you, Jamie. He’s mostly bark and very little bite.”
That wasn’t what she remembered. But the door closed behind them, leaving the two of them alone in the smoky, trashed room.
He moved then, picking up the overturned chairs on his way to the sink. They were in a kitchen of sorts, with a microwave, a hot plate, a tin sink and an old refrigerator. Which would undoubtedly be filled with beer. The old oak table in the center of the room took up most of the space, and he had to come way too close to her to reach the sink. He made no effort to avoid her, and she had to stumble back, out of his way.
He was washing the blood off his knuckles, and she stared at his hands. They were big hands, strong, with a webbing of little nicks and scars. His knuckles were skinned—it hadn’t just been his victim’s blood. He didn’t seem to react to any pain—he just rinsed the blood off and dried the raw knuckles with a paper towel. He tossed it in the overflowing trash can by the sink, but it missed and floated down to the floor in a lazy, graceful swirl.
He turned then, leaning against the sink to look at her, letting his eyes run from the top of her head to her wet, aching feet.
It was very nice of Mouser to call her a pretty waif. She couldn’t disagree with the waif part, but “pretty” was pushing it. Particularly right now, when she hadn’t slept for two days, wore no makeup, and her pale brown hair straggled around her face. She’d never been Dillon’s type, thank God, even at her best, and at her worst she was definitely safe. If anyone could be safe around Dillon.
“You can spend the night,” he said abruptly. “It’s after three, and I’m not in the mood to haul your car out of a ditch. Tomorrow I’ll get someone to tow it here, I’ll fix it, and you can get the hell out of here.”
“You’ll fix it?” she repeated.
“I’m a grease monkey, remember? I can fix any car. I just don’t happen to have a tow truck. I count on other people to drag them to me.” He opened the fridge, but to her surprise she couldn’t see any beer. They must have drunk it all. “I suppose you came to collect Nate’s stuff. Fine with me—it’s been just taking up room.”
“Then why wouldn’t you send it?”
“Couldn’t be bothered.” He took a carton of milk, opened it and drank.
She wondered what he’d do if she fainted. She was tempted—she couldn’t remember the last time she ate, and after her long, cold walk she was too hot, dizzy, ready to collapse, and he hadn’t even offered her a chair. She should walk to the nearest one and sit, but for some reason she couldn’t move.
She realized he was looking at her again. His eyes were just as cold, just as blue as she remembered. “You look like shit,” he said.
“Thank you.”
He pushed away from the sink. “Come on. I don’t feel like carrying you upstairs if you pass out.”
He was more observant than she realized. There were at least three closed doors leading off the small kitchen. He opened one to reveal a dark, narrow flight of stairs.
He took them two at a time. She hauled herself up with the handrail, slowly, knowing he was waiting for her at the top of the stairs.
He didn’t move out of her way when she reached the second floor. He moved to take her arm, and she jerked away from him in sudden panic.
She could feel nothing beneath her—she was falling, and she was going to break her neck on these rickety stairs, and then what would her mother do, and what the hell did she care, and…
He caught her arm and yanked her back onto solid ground. “Are you trying to kill yourself?” he snapped.
He was very strong. Stronger than she remembered. She’d have bruises on her arm.
“You can let go of me now,” she said.
“And have you take a header down the stairs? I don’t think so.” He moved down the hallway, dragging her after him.
The bare lightbulb overhead did little to illuminate their way. The place smelled of gasoline and cooking and all sorts of other smells she didn’t even want to think about. He pushed open a door and pulled the string from overhead. The light didn’t come on.
“Shit,” he muttered. “Stay here.”
At least he let go of her. She stood in the hallway, waiting, while he disappeared behind another door. When he came back he was carrying a sleeping bag and a small lamp. He pushed past her into the room, and in a moment the light came on. He’d plugged it in and set it on the floor next to the mattress that lay there, the only thing in the small, bare, dismal room.
He tossed the sleeping bag on the mattress. “You’ll have to make do with that. The bathroom’s down the hall. You want something to sleep in?”
“I’ll keep my clothes on.”
His smile was cool and fleeting. “I’m sure you will. Go to sleep, Jamie. Tomorrow you’ll be safely on your way home.”
And before she could respond he closed the door, shutting her into the tiny, empty room.
Someone was there, in the huge old building. He knew it without seeing, without hearing. Knew that someone had finally come, to break him free from the stasis that had held him .
Was the newcomer afraid of ghosts? He didn’t want to scare whoever it was. Not yet, at least. First he had to see if they were of any use .
And if they’d help him kill Dillon Gaynor. He’d been waiting too long. It was time for Dillon to pay .
2
J amie found the bathroom, a mixed blessing given its condition. She never could figure out why men were such utter pigs—it must have something to do with that extra chromosome. The only towel in sight was a dismal shade of gray, so she simply used her hands to wash her face, then glanced up at her reflection.
Waif, was it? At twenty-eight years old Jamie Kincaid looked much as she’d always looked. Pale skin, gray eyes, hair an indiscriminate shade between brown and blond.
She pushed her hair away from her face, staring at her reflection thoughtfully. Good bones, good skin, even features. Nothing to write home about, but nothing to be ashamed of, either. She was never going to attract the kind of dangerous attention from the wrong kind of man. The only reason Dillon had known of her existence was because of her cousin. If it hadn’t been for Nate he never would have noticed well-behaved Jamie. They’d hardly run in the same crowd in high school.
If you could even say he’d been in high school. There had never been anyone at home to make sure he attended regularly. His mother had left when he was young, and his father had died in a drunken car crash when Dillon was sixteen. He’d dropped out just before graduation, and there’d been some story that had been effectively hushed up. Maybe he’d gotten someone pregnant, though that seemed a relatively mild offense. Beaten someone, been arrested? All she knew was that the school and her family were furious with him, Nate was amused, and Dillon, when she saw him from a distance, defiant.
He was still defiant. Living in this rattrap, living his marginal existence. It was probably the best he could manage with his alcohol and drug problems. The addictions hadn’t yet made their mark on his face. He still looked very much like he’d looked twelve years ago, with a few lines added for interest.
As if he needed anything to make him more interesting. Jamie shivered, turning away from the mirror. This was harder than she’d expected, and she’d expected it to be tough. Seeing him again brought all sorts of feelings back, unwelcome memories flooding through her mind, through her rebellious body. He made her feel young and vulnerable again, just by being there. She’d been a fool to come.
She’d leave, first thing tomorrow. As soon as her car was up and running. He wanted her out of there, and she wanted to go. She’d grab Nate’s things and take off. Dillon wasn’t going to give her the answers she needed. She should have remembered that much about him. He never gave up anything he didn’t want to.
No lock on her bedroom door, of course. Not that it would have made any difference—as far as she knew she was alone in this old building with Dillon, and he wouldn’t let anything as flimsy as a lock get in the way of what he wanted. And why in hell would he want her?
She shut the door, anyway, then picked up the lamp and held it over the mattress. It was thin, stained, but there was nothing crawling on it, and she was so bone tired she could weep. If she were in the habit of crying. She shook out the sleeping bag, unzipped it and crawled in.
And immediately scrambled back out in a panic, knocking the lamp over. It was an old down sleeping bag, and it smelled like Dillon. Like his skin, an ineffable scent that was unmistakable and disturbing. Almost…erotic. She couldn’t possibly sleep with that thing around her—it was like being wrapped in his embrace.
She sat on the thin mattress, shivering. There was no way she could attempt the long drive back home, no way she could escape without sleep. And no way she could sleep without some kind of cover.
She stretched back out on the mattress and pulled the sleeping bag over her. It settled against her like a silky cloud.
There was no escaping him, not that night. She’d chosen to walk straight into the lion’s den—she might as well accept it.
Tomorrow she’d be gone. Come to her senses. If her mother needed more answers she’d have to hire a private detective.
Nate was dead. Nothing would bring him back, and right now answers, justice, even revenge seemed too dangerous a quest. Maybe when she’d gotten some sleep she’d see things differently, but she didn’t think so. One look into Dillon Gaynor’s cold blue eyes reminded her of just how dangerous he could be. And she was a woman who valued safety.
She turned off the light, and the room was plunged into a thick, inky darkness, punctuated by a blinking neon sign somewhere beyond her window. He hadn’t given her a pillow, and there was no way she was going to go looking for one. She punched her sweater into a ball and put it under her head, pulling the sleeping bag up to her chin.
He was everywhere. Beneath her, above her, surrounding her. There was no fighting it, not now. She closed her eyes and remembered.
Twelve years ago
It was a beautiful late spring night in Rhode Island when Jamie Kincaid grew up. She was sixteen years old, privileged, beloved, living in a dream world with nothing more to worry about than grades and dates. Grades were no problem—as her cousin, Nate, always told her, she was too smart for her own good.
And dates weren’t usually an issue, either. She’d had a pleasant, nonthreatening boyfriend who’d done no more than give her a few closedmouthed kisses, and when he dumped her on the eve of the junior prom she was more annoyed than hurt. She had the dress, she’d worked on the committee, she had every intention of going, anyway, and dragooned her cousin Nate to take her.
Nate was more a brother than a cousin. He’d lived with his aunt Isobel and uncle Victor for the last nine years, since his parents had died in a fire. Jamie was an only child, and she’d always wanted an older brother. And ten-year-old Nate was a dream come true for young Jamie.
She still adored him, though nine years together had worn off some of the novelty. But then, everybody adored Nate—he was incredibly handsome, with a dazzling smile, dark eyes, silky black hair and the kind of rugged body that made him perfect for sports and teenage fantasies. He was beloved by teachers and students alike, his surrogate parents, and most especially by his besotted cousin, Jamie.
“What’s up, kitten?”
Jamie looked up from her spot on the floor. The pale pink prom dress billowed out around her, and she wondered if unshed tears made her makeup run. Being dumped wasn’t worth crying for. It was just…annoying.
She managed a crooked smile. Her cousin Nate hated emotions. With his easy charm he breezed through life, and he preferred those around him to do the same, and since Jamie adored him she did her best. “I just got dumped. Zack told me he was breaking up with me and taking Sara Jackson to the prom.”
Nate shook his head. “Great timing. I could have told you Zack was a loser. Want Dillon and me to go beat him up for you?”
Jamie controlled a little shiver. Her cousin was only kidding, but when it came to someone like his friend Dillon Gaynor there was no telling what might happen. “Don’t bother. I’ll get revenge sooner or later.”
“I suppose you still want to go to the prom? Forget it, precious! I may love you like a brother, but I’m not going to take you to a high school junior prom. I’ve already suffered through one once.”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t ask you. I’m not going.”
“So what are you going to do? Aunt Isobel and uncle Victor have already gone out, and I’ve got plans with Killer. Wanna come along?”
Killer was Nate’s affectionate name for his lowlife friend Dillon. Unfortunately there were times when Jamie wondered whether or not it was a bit too appropriate. “That’s all right. You don’t want a sixteen-year-old tagging along after you. I’ll be fine. There’s a book I want to read….”
“Nope,” Nate said flatly. “You aren’t going to miss out on your prom to curl up with a good book. You’re coming with us. Time to visit the wild side of life. See how the other half lives. Try a little danger.”
“I’m not big on danger.”
“Your big cousin will be there to protect you,” he said. “And Dillon will make sure nothing happens to you.”
“Like I trust him?” she scoffed.
“Trust who?” Dillon said, lounging in her doorway.
That was only one of the things she didn’t like about him. He always walked in, appearing out of the blue. He seemed to know when her parents were gone—Victor and Isobel Kincaid neither liked nor approved of Nate’s friend, and he was wise enough to make himself scarce when they were around. But anytime they were gone he’d be lounging in front of the big-screen TV, eating their food, smoking cigarettes, watching her out of his cool, insolent blue eyes. When he bothered to pay any attention to her at all.
“My little cousin thinks you’re a dangerous man,” Nate said with a laugh. He was a few inches shorter than Dillon, dark hair to Dillon’s bleached-blond shag, sunshine and good nature to Dillon’s mocking deference that always bordered on rudeness. It was no wonder her mother disliked him.
“She’s right,” Dillon said, looking down at her. “So are you ready?”
“I’m trying to talk Jamie into coming with us. She just got stood up, and I thought it was time to broaden her horizons.”
She half expected Dillon to object, but he simply looked at her and shrugged. “If you think she’s up to it.”
“She’s my biggest fan,” Nate said. “She’d never rat us out. Besides, Jamie can be your date since you don’t have one.”
“No!” Jamie said, her horror overriding her usual courtesy.
If anything, Dillon seemed more amused than offended. “I don’t need a date where we’re going. I think you’re asking for trouble here, Nate.”
Nate’s smile was wide, the kind that won over friend and foe alike, clouded men’s minds and women’s, too. “But you know I love trouble.” He reached out a hand to Jamie and pulled her to her feet.
“She’s not wearing that,” Dillon said.
“Killer, you are no fun at all,” Nate protested. “I think we should show up at Crazy Jack’s with my cousin the prom queen.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Jamie said nervously.
“Of course it is. Go change into something sexy. Dress like a bad girl for a change. Wouldn’t you like to be a bad girl, just once?”
“Not particularly.” She cast a wary glance up at Dillon. He tended to ignore her, and she’d probably exchanged maybe a dozen words with him in her entire life. “What do you think, Dillon? Should I come with you guys?”
She should have known she’d get no answer from him. “Suit yourself. Just hurry up.”
She was crazy to do it. Her parents only tolerated Dillon because of Nate, but there was no way they’d approve of her going out with them. Dillon came from the wrong side of the tracks, and his behavior befitted his upbringing. He’d already spent three months in juvie for stealing cars, and no one had any illusions that he’d changed his ways. He’d just gotten more careful.
Jamie could never understand what Nate saw in him. Maybe it was his to-hell-with-you attitude. Nate charmed everyone he came in contact with, needing their approval; Dillon didn’t care one way or another. He just did what he wanted and let the chips fall where they may.
And she was going out with him. Well, not with him, really. She was just tagging along with her cousin and Dillon and as soon as they got to Crazy Jack’s, wherever that was, he’d find someone to keep himself busy. Nate would look after her—she trusted him with her life.
The prom dress ripped slightly when she yanked it over her head. She tossed it in the corner, found a pair of jeans and a big white shirt. She buttoned it up high, just so Dillon didn’t get any ideas, and headed back out to the sound of their voices before she could change her mind.
They were in the kitchen drinking beer. Her father wouldn’t like that one bit—the boys were only nineteen and one of them would be driving. Dillon was to blame, of course. Maybe after tonight Jamie would have some kind of idea of what Nate saw in him. And if she did, maybe she’d help her parents figure out how to get Nate away from such a dangerous influence.
“That’s better, precious,” Nate said approvingly. Dillon said nothing, draining his beer.
“We’d better get going. Rachel will be pissed.”
“Who’s Rachel?” Jamie asked. Maybe Dillon had a girlfriend, after all. In fact, he was very good-looking. A polar opposite to her cousin, he was tall, blue-eyed, teenage skinny with endless legs. He had the best cheekbones she’d ever seen on a man, she had to admit that much. And the kind of mouth a susceptible girl might find attractive. If she liked danger.
“Never you mind about Rachel,” Nate said fondly. “She’s nothing serious. Just for fun.”
“Is she your date or Dillon’s?” she asked.
“Carry these.” Dillon shoved a six-pack of beer into her arms. “And you’ve forgotten. You’re my date for the night.”
She looked at him warily, not certain whether he was kidding or not. With Dillon you could never quite tell.
Her only choice was to ignore him. She wrapped her arms around the beer, hoping the white cotton of her shirt would disguise her bundle, and followed them out into the driveway.
It was a warm night in May. The peepers were in full voice, and there was a soft breeze ruffling through the bright green leaves overhead. The kind of night that always put an ache of longing in the pit of her stomach, though she never could quite figure out what she was longing for.
Dillon’s old car was parked in the driveway. There was no mistaking it—a very old yellow Cadillac convertible that he’d fixed up himself. It was fast and big, and he could outrun the police if he really wanted to. As far as Jamie knew, he’d never wanted to.
He’d always tinkered with cars. He’d been driving since he was thirteen, and she had no idea if he had a driver’s license even now. He went around to the driver’s side and climbed in, not bothering to open the door. Not bothering to open hers, either, of course.
She reached for the rear door, but Nate was ahead of her. “You sit in the front, kitten. I want the back seat for me and Rachel.”
He smiled at her, beguiling as always, and there was no way she could object.
“The doors don’t work,” Dillon said. “You’ll have to climb in. Hand me the beer.”
She hesitated. She could still go to the prom—there was no shame in going alone, and she had the dress. That stupid pink dress that she’d torn.
Safety or danger? Dillon was looking up at her, his cool blue eyes daring her. She climbed over the side of the car and slid down onto the worn leather seat of the Caddy, putting the beer beside her.
He took one, opened it and set it between his legs. Immediately drawing her attention to his crotch. She jerked her head away, staring straight forward. He wouldn’t notice the blush of color on her face. He wasn’t that interested.
He drove fast but well. He’d jury-rigged a cassette tape player into the dashboard, and he had it playing loud heavy-metal music. He finished one beer, tossed the can in the bushes and opened another, all without sparing a glance her way.
She had no idea where they were going, and the little shiver of excitement in the pit of her stomach mixed with fear as he turned down a dirt road, barely slowing the car. It sped along the rutted surface, moving deeper into the woods, until he finally came to a stop in a clearing. A battered old pickup truck was parked there, accompanied by a couple of rusting wrecks, and a narrow path led through the woods to a tumbledown building almost out of sight.
Nate had already jumped out of the back seat. “You guys stay here. I told Rachel to meet me at the house. I’ll just go get the stuff and be back in a minute.”
Dillon switched off the car, stretching out in the front seat. “Take your time,” he said lazily. “My date will keep me entertained.”
Was that excitement or dread in her stomach? Or a heady combination of both? “Maybe I should go with him…” she said nervously.
“I don’t think so. He and Rachel will want some privacy. He’ll be back eventually.”
“Eventually?” she echoed, and she could hear the panic in her own voice.
“Don’t look so terrified, sweet cakes. I don’t bite. Much.”
She was already as far from him on the wide front seat of the Cadillac as she could get. He reached between them, ripped another beer from the plastic ring and then set the remainder on the floor. Leaving nothing between them. “Have a beer,” he said. She wasn’t sure if it was an offer or an order.
“I don’t think…”
“I thought this was your big night of rebellion. Take the beer, Jamie.”
She took it. It wasn’t as if it was the first beer she’d ever had. She just didn’t like it much. However, she was so nervous her stomach was doing flip-flops, and maybe the beer would calm her down, help her to relax. She didn’t want Dillon thinking she was a total idiot. Though she didn’t even want to consider why his opinion suddenly mattered.
The beer was lukewarm, yeasty, and she took a long drink. Dillon lounged against the door, making no move toward her, watching her out of hooded eyes. “Nate will be bringing some more stuff if you’d prefer grass.”
“I don’t!” she said quickly.
“Just say no?” he mocked. “I bet you’re good at that, sweet cakes. I bet you say no all the time. Do you ever say yes?”
She didn’t answer, and he didn’t seem to expect her to. He leaned back against the seat, looking up into the darkening sky, totally relaxed, while Jamie sat miles away on the other side of the car, clutching her beer.
So he was every young girl’s secret fantasy, she mocked herself. Latter-day James Dean, bad boy with a killer smile and a mouth that could tempt a nun. And she was no nun.
“Do you want to make out?” she asked suddenly.
He turned to look at her, slowly, lazily. “Is that an offer?”
She squirmed, uncomfortable. “Well, if I’m really your date…”
“You’re not,” he said. “Much as I appreciate the offer of a virgin sacrifice, I think I’ll pass this time. I don’t make out.”
She took another swig of the beer. It was almost gone, and she wondered if he’d offer her another one. Probably not. “You don’t? Don’t you like girls?”
His smile was the most dangerous thing she’d ever seen in her life. “I like girls just fine. I don’t make out, I don’t neck, I don’t kiss as a recreational activity.”
“Then what do you do?”
“I fuck.”
Jamie choked on the last of her beer. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me. I fuck. I don’t kiss women unless I want to fuck them, and I sure as hell don’t kiss jailbait like you unless it’s a sure thing. And I don’t think you’re going to be slipping out of those jeans anytime soon, are you? Not for me.”
She just stared at him. Night was falling, and the breeze had picked up just slightly, running through his shaggy blond hair like a lover’s caress. “No,” she said in a small voice.
His smile was small and mocking. “I didn’t think so. Not from the way you’re hugging that side of the car. Don’t worry, baby girl. I won’t touch you.” He turned his head, peering through the gathering darkness. “It won’t be long now. Nate doesn’t have much staying power.”
“Staying power? What are you talking about?”
“He and Rachel are having sex. He goes for quantity rather than quality, and Rachel’s a good match for him. They’ll be out in a few more minutes, smelling of sex, half drunk with it. That, and the dope he went to get.”
“Whose house is that?”
“Mine.”
“Are they your drugs?”
“Yes.”
She was silent. She’d gone through all the mandatory drug-education classes, she knew the dangers. She’d been around marijuana enough to know the smell, to see people get giggly with it, then numbed out. “Are you a dealer?”
“Why? You looking to score?”
“No. I was just curious.”
“I think you ought to stifle that curiosity, sweet cakes,” he said. He glanced at his watch, a cheap Timex, and swore. “Maybe Nate’s being more creative than usual.” He looked over at her, considering. “Maybe I’ve changed my mind.”
“What?” It came out as a nervous little squeak.
“Come here.”
3
J amie woke up in the shadowy gloom, lost, disoriented, fighting back panic. There was a loud, roaring noise coming from somewhere, she was cold, her back hurt, and for a moment she had no idea where she was. The neon light flashed on again, illuminating the small room for a brief moment, and she remembered. And felt her panic increase.
She sat up, taking deep, calming breaths. She never liked sleeping in unfamiliar beds—one of the many reasons she’d driven straight to Wisconsin without stopping at a motel along the way. Even in the familiarity of her own bed she seldom slept well—the slightest sound would jar her awake and she would lie there, for hours on end, staring into the darkness.
At least this time she had a reason. The windowsill was eye level from her seat on the floor, and she looked out over the alleyway, into the dismal gray light of a November dawn. She had no idea how long she’d slept—it might have been hours, or minutes. The room was cold, and in the unforgiving light of day it looked like a cell. Though she could finally identify the roaring noise as heat pouring into the room from a vent near her mattress. At least this place came equipped with an extremely noisy furnace.
She lay back down again, closing her eyes. There was no use getting up—Dillon would be sleeping off the effects of whatever he’d had the night before, and he wouldn’t be in any shape to help her. Not that he’d be interested in doing anything for her—they’d never gotten along. But he’d be motivated to get her out of there, if for no other reason than he’d never liked her.
She shivered. It had never really left her—that haunted night so long ago. Months, even years, went by without her thinking about it, without remembering the painful embarrassment and shame, but one look into Dillon’s cold blue eyes had brought everything back, with a vengeance. The rough pleasure in his hands. The shattering misery of how it ended.
She took a slow, deep breath, willing her tense body to relax. Long ago, she reminded herself. And by the end of the night Dillon had been so wasted there was no way he could remember any details. If he even remembered that night at all.
She must have been out of her mind to think that she could come here unscathed. Though maybe that was part of the reason she’d come, jumped in her car before she thought better of it, taking off into the dark November night like an angel on a mission. She wanted answers about Nate’s death. But she needed to face Dillon Gaynor and put any lingering emotions to rest. To let go of the past before she could get on with her future. And like it or not, Dillon was part of her past, inextricably entwined with Nate.
She’d been wearing the same clothes for forty-eight hours, and she was feeling beyond grungy. As soon as she got away from here she’d stop at the first motel she found, take a two-hour shower and even try for a nap. And then drive straight back to Rhode Island, with no more answers than she’d had when she started on this idiot quest.
At least the room was warming up, and she could dispense with the sleeping bag. She shoved a hand through her tangled hair, scrambling off the thin mattress. And then she saw her suitcase.
She stared at it, not making the mistake of thinking it a good sign. If Dillon had managed to fix her car, then he wouldn’t have brought her suitcase up—he wouldn’t do anything to prolong her stay.
She opened the door to the long, narrow hallway. The bare lightbulb at the end illuminated the empty bathroom. All the other doors were closed, and she wondered where he slept.
Not that it mattered. At that moment the bathroom was looking pretty damned good, and a shower was becoming more and more appealing with the arrival of clean clothes. She wasn’t getting out of here until Dillon woke up and she was able to get Nate’s things, and there was no way she was going to sit around in these clothes for another minute.
At least there was a lock on the bathroom door. One of those old skeleton key things—if she’d had half a brain the night before she could have taken the key and locked her own door. And then Dillon couldn’t have come in the darkness to dump her suitcase. Had he stood there and stared at her while she slept? Doubtful.
The bathtub was a grimy, claw-footed antique with a shower overhead, but the water was hot and the grayish towels smelled clean. She combed her wet hair with her fingers and grimaced at her reflection. She’d thrown T-shirts and jeans in her suitcase instead of her usual professional clothes. She looked like a twelve-year-old, with her scrubbed, makeup-free face, wet hair and boy’s clothes. Any other twenty-eight-year-old woman would be happy to look so young. For Jamie it just reminded her of when she was sixteen and Dillon Gaynor was the terrifying center of her universe.
She’d had all sorts of fantasies about what it would be like if or when she saw him again. She’d be cool, calm, mature, with perfect hair and makeup, maybe a subdued suit and the string of pearls her parents had given her. The person she was raised to be.
Instead she’d shown up at his doorstep like a snowy waif. And he wasn’t going to look at her today and see the calm, professional woman she’d become. He’d see a kid, and he’d remember.
Maybe. Or maybe that night was just a blur, along with a thousand other nights. Maybe he didn’t remember.
But the problem was, she did.
The hall was still dark and silent, all the doors closed. She dumped her dirty clothes in a corner in her room, then glanced outside. It was getting lighter—maybe seven o’clock in the morning. She had two choices: wait for Dillon to get over his hangover and drag himself out of bed, or go down and start taking care of things on her own. It was a no-brainer. She needed to find out where her car was, get it towed, call Isobel, find some coffee, find something to eat….
The stairway was narrow and dark, and if there were any lights she couldn’t find them. She went down carefully, holding on to the rickety railing, feeling her way in the shadows. She got to the bottom, reaching for the door into the kitchen, when she stepped on something soft and squishy. Something big.
She screamed, falling back in the shadows, and then immediately she felt stupid. It was probably nothing, just a discarded piece of clothing….
The door to the kitchen was yanked open, and Dillon stood there, filling it, radiating impatience. “What the hell are you yowling about?” he demanded. “Did you fall?”
“I—I stepped on something,” she said, trying to control her stammer. “It was probably nothing….” She glanced down at the small square of floor at the bottom of the stairs. She gulped. “Or maybe not.”
“It’s a rat,” Dillon said, his voice as flat as his expression. “We get them every now and then.”
“You have rats?” she demanded in horror.
“Sorry, princess, but this ain’t the Taj Mahal. It’s an old warehouse, and rats come with the territory. They show up occasionally, but at least they’re dead. Someone must have put some rat poison behind the walls years ago and it’s still working. Every now and then there’s a nice fresh corpse, and I don’t have to worry about them getting into the food.”
Food, Jamie thought. She glanced down at the dead rat, but even a corpse wasn’t enough to distract her. “I’m hungry,” she said.
“Then go on into the kitchen and find yourself something to eat. Unless you were thinking of fried rat?”
She rose from her seat on the stairs and glared at him. Two steps up put her eye level with him, and the result was disconcerting. “Maybe you could move the rat first? I don’t want to step on it.”
Big mistake. Before she knew what he was doing he’d simply picked her up, swung her across the small square of floor and set her down in the kitchen. Letting go of her immediately, as if she weren’t any more appealing than the dead rat. Maybe less. “There you go, Your Highness. There’s bread on the counter and beer in the fridge.”
“Or course there is,” she said, hostile. “But I’m not in the habit of drinking beer for breakfast.”
“You oughtta try it. Good for what ails you.”
“Nothing ails me.”
“Nothing but that stick up your ass,” Dillon said pleasantly, picking the rat up by the tail. It swung limply from his hand, and she shuddered.
“I’ll save the beer for you,” she said, controlling her shudder.
“Good of you.” He carried the rat over to the back door, opened it and flung it out into the alleyway. “All taken care of,” he said.
“You’re just going to leave it out there? Spreading disease and God knows what else?”
“The bubonic plague is over. And if it comes back I’m willing to bet you’d be happy to have me get the first case.”
“You got me there.”
He seemed to consider the idea for a moment. “Besides, there are enough scavengers around that he won’t be there for long. He’ll either be eaten by his brothers or carried off by some stray dog.”
“What makes you think it’s a he?”
“That was for your benefit. I assumed you think all rats are male.”
“Good point,” she said. The kitchen didn’t look much better than it had last night. The bottles had been swept off the table, but the smell of cigarettes and stale beer lingered in the air, with the faint note of exhaust beneath it.
“Bread’s on the counter,” he said. “I’ll make coffee.”
There were exactly two pieces of bread in the plastic bag, both of them heels. “Where’s the toaster?”
“Broken. There’s some peanut butter over the stove—make yourself a sandwich.”
Isobel would have fainted with shock at the idea of peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast. Jamie was just grateful for the protein. She sat down at the scarred oak table to make her sandwich, watching as Dillon reached for the coffeepot. He poured out the dregs, filled the carafe with water and put it back in the machine.
“Aren’t you going to wash it out first?”
“Why? It’s going to hold coffee, and that’s what it held before. What’s the big deal?” He leaned against the counter, watching her lazily.
“The old coffee oils will make it bitter,” she said, not even getting to the cleanliness part. From the look of Dillon’s littered kitchen, cleanliness wasn’t high on his list.
“Maybe I like bitter.”
“I have no doubt that you do,” she said. The bread was slightly stale, but it was solid, and she devoured her makeshift sandwich. “I don’t suppose you have anything as mundane as a soda?”
“They call it pop out here in the hinterlands, Your Highness. Check in the fridge.”
He’d been lying about the beer. They must have finished it all during their late-night poker game. The contents of the refrigerator consisted of a chunk of moldy cheese, half a quart of milk and enough cans of soda to satisfy anyone. She grabbed a Coke and shut the door, snapping the top and taking a long drink, letting the sugary caffeine bubble down her throat.
He was watching her, an unreadable expression on his face. Not that she’d ever been able to guess what he was thinking. “What?” she demanded irritably.
“You don’t strike me as the type who’d drink straight from the can.”
“Maybe I don’t trust your idea of cleanliness.”
“I’m sure it’s not up to your standards.”
“It’s not. When did you get my suitcase? Is my car here?”
“Your car’s still stuck in a ditch out on the highway. And I didn’t get the suitcase. Mouser was running an errand for me and he stopped and got it. You made quite an impression on him, but then, he doesn’t know you as well as I do.”
“You don’t know me at all. We haven’t seen each other in twelve years, and back then you had nothing to do with me.”
“That’s not the way I remember it.”
It felt as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. She didn’t even blink. “And your memory is so clear after all these years?”
“Clear enough.” She wondered if she was imagining the faint thread of menace beneath his smooth tone. Probably not.
“I need to call my mother.”
“Why?”
“To tell her I got here safely. And to tell her I’ll be leaving as soon as the car is ready. This afternoon, I hope.”
“Hope away,” he said. “Mouser said your car was pretty messed up.”
“This is a garage, isn’t it? I’ll pay you to fix it.”
“I work on old American cars, not imports. Different tools.”
“Then I’ll call Triple A. If they can find someone to fix it I’ll stay in a motel until it’s ready—otherwise I’ll rent a car.”
“Honey, this town is the armpit of despair. The only motel around rents rooms by the hour, not the night, and no one rents cars but me.”
“So?”
He glanced at her. “So I don’t rent cars to drive out of state. No way to get them back.”
“I’d think you’d be motivated to get me out of here.”
“Now, that’s where you’re wrong,” he said lazily, reaching for the coffeepot, which was now filled with thick black sludge. “I think I’m going to enjoy reliving old times. The halcyon days of my youth and all that.”
“Your youth wasn’t particularly halcyon.”
“Neither was yours, princess.”
“That’s not the way I remember it. I had two loving parents, a secure life, I had Nate as my brother and best friend. Until you got your hooks into him.”
He took a chair at the table, reaching for his cigarettes. It seemed like years since she’d been around anyone who smoked, and she watched with fascination as he lit the cigarette with a flip of his silver lighter. “Memories can be faulty,” he said, and blew smoke at her.
She would have liked to summon up a hacking cough, but in fact she’d never been particularly sensitive to smoke. Besides, he was clearly trying to bother her, and she wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. “Maybe yours are. I think I’m a little clearer on details than you would be.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Where’s the telephone?”
“In the garage. It’s a pay phone—be sure you have plenty of quarters.”
“How do you manage to do business without a phone?”
“I don’t like people intruding on my privacy.”
“Then I’ll be doing my best to get the hell out of here. Just find me Nate’s stuff and I’ll give AAA a call.”
“What’s the hurry, princess? Nate’s been dead for three months—he’s not going anywhere.”
“Don’t you even care?” she demanded. “He was your best friend! A brother to you, and he died when he was under your roof. Don’t you feel anything? Grief, regret, responsibility?”
“I’m not responsible for Nate’s death,” he said in a detached voice.
“I didn’t say you were. But you’re the one who should have protected him. If he’d gotten in with a bad crowd you should have done something, anything, to help him….” Her voice trailed off in the face of his ironic expression.
“Maybe you better make those phone calls,” he said, rising and pouring himself a mug of steaming sludge. “You want any of this?”
“I’d rather die.”
“Sooner or later, angel face, you’re going to have to learn to lower your patrician standards.”
“You aren’t going to be around to see it.”
“Oh, that’s where you’re wrong. I’m looking forward to it.”
The smell of the coffee was tantalizing. She knew it would be awful—too strong, too bitter. It would wreak havoc on her stomach and her nerves, and even milk and sugar wouldn’t make it palatable. And she wanted it, anyway.
She rose, shoving a hand through her wet hair. He was watching her, and she didn’t like it. The sooner she was out of there the better. “So my car’s still in the ditch on…what road did you say it was?”
“Route 31.”
“Fine. I’ll call AAA, I’ll call my mother, and I’ll make arrangements to give you back your privacy as soon as possible. That’s what you’d like, right? Have me get the hell out of here?”
“Do you have any doubts about that?” He stubbed out his cigarette, looking up at her above the thread of smoke.
In fact, she did. It didn’t make sense, but he didn’t seem in any hurry to have her leave. “I’ll just go get my purse. Maybe my cell phone will work here.”
“Maybe,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee and not even grimacing. “But I wouldn’t count on it. I wouldn’t count on anything if I were you.”
She didn’t bother arguing with him. She didn’t bother wasting another word on him—she simply headed up the dark, narrow stairs, stepping over the stained spot where the rat’s corpse had rested, going straight to her room.
In the gray light of a November morning it looked even less welcoming than it had before. The room was Spartan—just the mattress on the floor, the sleeping bag and her suitcase.
And no sign of her purse anywhere.
It was cold up here. Nate never thought he would be so cold, looking down on them. It was an odd sort of feeling—floating, dreamy, and then everything coming into focus. He should have known she was coming—he just couldn’t understand what had taken her so long to get here. His death would have shattered her, and there was no way she could move on with her life without getting answers. She’d come here to face his old buddy Dillon. The man who had let him die .
He wasn’t sure what he was going to do about it yet, even though he’d had a long time to think about it. Time had stopped making any sense, one day blending into another. He was trapped in this old building, unable to leave, but he’d heard her moving around, and known it was her .
The dead rat had been a nice touch. He left one every few days, not on a regular schedule. He didn’t want to be too predictable. He hadn’t expected Jamie to be the one to find it, but he didn’t mind. It meant Dillon had to come up with explanations, fast. And if he knew Dillon, he wasn’t about to tell her that the old factory was haunted by the ghost of her murdered cousin .
No, infested by rats was a preferable explanation. And it was. The rat of a man who’d betrayed his best friend and sent him to his death. And the King Rat himself, Nate Kincaid .
You can’t keep a good man down .
4
J amie searched, of course. It had been there when she woke up, hadn’t it? Dillon couldn’t have taken it—he’d been with her the entire time. And there was no way up to the second floor except that dark, rat-infested stairway, and no one had passed them while they sat arguing at the kitchen table.
Or maybe whoever had dumped her suitcase in the room had taken the purse. She wasn’t carrying a lot of cash, though her small supply of sleeping pills might appeal to some teenage druggie. And hell, what was Dillon but an overgrown teenage druggie? It had to be him.
She sat down on the mattress. She should go downstairs and confront him, demand that he return her purse. He’d deny taking it, of course. She was going to have a hell of a hard time getting out of here without her license and credit cards. No one would rent her a car, much less a room, without ID and credit. If he didn’t give it back to her she was stuck.
She stretched out on the thin mattress, staring at the cracked ceiling. He didn’t want her here. Why the hell would he do something that would keep her trapped here? Why, when he’d never liked her? If he even remembered that night so long ago, all he’d remember was what an idiot she’d been. What an embarrassing, pathetic idiot.
Twelve years ago
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said, and the soft breeze of early summer riffled through his too-long hair. “Come here.”
Jamie sat frozen in the front seat of the old Cadillac, practically wedged between the seat and the door. The beer bottle in her hands was empty, and in the gathering dusk Dillon Gaynor looked like every good girl’s worst nightmare. And secret, shameful dream.
She’d had her share of them. They all had, all the good girls of Marshfield, Rhode Island. He was wicked, he was sexy, he was as pretty as sin. Just the sort to daydream about. Just the sort to keep away from. And she was sitting in the front seat of an old Cadillac convertible with him, alone in the woods, and she’d been fool enough to bring up the subject of kissing.
She didn’t move. “I was just kidding,” she said, unable to keep the thread of nerves out of her voice.
“I wasn’t.” He took the empty beer bottle out of her hands and threw it into the woods. And then he reached for her, pulling her across the broad front seat. The old leather was so soft and smooth she slid easily, until she was touching him, thigh to thigh, and he was looking down into her breathless face. “So where do we start?”
“You drive me home, then come back and get Nate and his girlfriend?” she suggested in a nervous voice.
“I don’t think so.” He picked up her hand and looked at it for a long, contemplative moment. “Baby-pink nail polish. Did that match your prom dress?”
She’d chosen the shade just for that purpose, but she wasn’t about to admit it. He wasn’t expecting her to. He just held her delicate hand in his large, callused one, rubbing his thumb over her palm, slowly, sinuously. “Such an innocent hand,” he said. “What naughty things have you done with it?”
“Nothing.”
“I can believe it,” he murmured, pulling her hand to his mouth. He put his mouth against her palm, and she felt a shiver run through her body. And then he licked it, and the feel of his tongue against her skin shocked her. “Time you learned,” he said. And he put her hand against his chest.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been wearing the usual ratty T-shirt. But tonight he wore a faded Hawaiian-style shirt, and it was partly open, and her damp palm was pressed against his warm flesh without the safety of thin cotton between them.
He was hot. His skin burned beneath her cold hand, and she could feel the slow, steady pulse of his heart, beating against her palm, moving down her arm and into her body, so that her heart was beating with his, but faster, much faster, and she was cold where he was hot, and she stared up at him, paralyzed.
He kept her hand captured in his, pressed against his heart, as he leaned forward and flicked on the car radio. U2 was playing—Bono was singing about sex and love, just what she didn’t want to hear. He leaned back in the seat again, his fingers touching hers, caressing them, one by one, as he slowly unbuttoned the rest of his shirt with his other hand.
She felt like a small white rat facing a hungry python. Mesmerized, she sat in the front seat of the old convertible and waited for him to make the next move.
This was Dillon Gaynor, the object of her teenage fantasies since the first time he’d walked into her parents’ house, whether she’d wanted to admit it or not. It was his skin beneath her hand, and he was moving his head closer, and he was going to kiss her, he actually was, and she closed her eyes, holding her breath, waiting.
He tasted like beer. And cigarettes. And sin, sweet sin. The baddest of all bad boys, and he was kissing her, his mouth moving slowly over her closed lips, his hand pressing hers against his hot skin, holding it there. She closed her eyes, telling herself this wasn’t happening, and since it wasn’t, she wasn’t doing anything wrong or dangerous, and she could just lean back against the ratty leather seat and let him kiss her. He lifted his head.
“Is that the way you kiss your boyfriends?”
The nice dreamlike haze vanished, and she opened her eyes, trying to sit up. He held her down. “I know there’ve been boyfriends,” he continued, and she realized he was moving her hand across his stomach, in slow, erotic circles. “Nate’s told me all about them. Jimmy McCarty and Jay Thompson. You have lousy taste in boys.”
“Is that why I’m here with you?” she said.
“Kitten’s got claws,” he murmured. “Open your mouth when I kiss you.”
“I don’t like that.”
“Tough. You’re playing with grown-ups now. This is how we do it in the big leagues.” He pushed her back against the seat and forced her mouth open before she could come up with another protest. He kissed her, using his tongue, slowly, thoroughly, and she felt a heat begin to pool in her stomach, radiating outward. Dillon Gaynor definitely knew how to kiss. What had been wet and sloppy with Jimmy was slow and mesmerizing with Dillon. She hadn’t even realized he’d released her hand, and she was slowly caressing the warm skin of his stomach, until she felt his hand on the waist of her jeans, heard the rasp of her zipper as his hand slipped inside.
She panicked. It didn’t do her any good, he was too strong for her. His mouth silenced any protest, his body pressing against hers kept her from escaping, and his hands, his fingers, slid beneath her plain cotton panties to touch her.
She had the strength to wrench her mouth away from his. “Stop it,” she whispered. “Let me go.” She could have screamed, maybe. But she didn’t want to.
He pushed her face against his shoulder, his mouth by her ear, and he took a small, wicked bite of her earlobe. “Just relax,” he said. “Consider this a graduation present.”
“But I didn’t graduate,” she murmured in a dazed voice.
“You’re about to.”
One of her hands was trapped beneath their bodies, but she wrenched the other free to grab his shoulder and try to push him away. He didn’t budge.
“Close your eyes, baby girl,” he whispered. “I’m about to show you a very good time.”
There was nothing she could do to stop him—he was too strong, too determined, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He pushed his fingers inside her, and she wanted to die of shame. And he was rubbing her, using his thumb, and she knew what he was trying to do, but she couldn’t even do it on her own, much less with a stranger touching her, inside her, rubbing her until she moaned.
“That’s right, sweetheart,” he whispered. “That’s what I want to hear from you. Just a little bit louder.”
She bit her lip to keep from making any sound, but it didn’t do any good. She felt a spasm of reaction wash over her, and she shivered, her voice choked.
“Better,” he murmured. “But I think I want to make you cry.”
“Dillon,” she said in a cracked voice. Begged, though she wasn’t sure what she was begging for.
But Dillon knew. He knew exactly what he was doing to her, how to make her shiver and teeter on the very precipice, and then draw back, only to bring her forward again, stronger than ever, and she wanted to weep.
“Come on, baby girl,” he whispered in her ear. “Let go. Stop fighting me, stop fighting it. Come for me.”
She didn’t have any choice. It washed over her like an explosive force, as her body arched, rigid, and she wanted to scream, to cry, to make it stop, to make it last forever. It was too powerful, too overwhelming, and she let out a low, keening cry that he swallowed with his mouth, keeping her silent as he prolonged her orgasm past human endurance.
And then she collapsed beneath him, in a boneless, quivering heap, lying against his strong body in the front seat of the old Caddy, shaken and tearful.
He pulled his hand free and fastened her jeans again, pulling up the zipper and snapping the snap with experienced ease. Her face was wet with tears, but at least it was too dark for him to see, until she felt his fingers wiping them away in the darkness.
“What’s going on in there?” Nate’s slurred voice rang out in the darkness. “Are you corrupting my little cousin, Killer?”
“Of course not,” he said in a lazy voice, pushing her down on the seat, out of sight. “I tried to talk her into it but she’s too prim and proper. She just got tired of waiting for you and Rachel.”
“Sorry, kiddo,” Nate said in a careless voice. She couldn’t see anything from her vantage point on the cracked leather seat of the old Caddy, but it sounded as if it was just as well. Nate and his girlfriend climbed into the back seat, and she could smell the sickly sweet scent of marijuana permeating the air, mixing with the smell of liquor. Not the beer that Dillon had been drinking, something stronger.
“Drive on, Jeeves!” Nate ordered in a lordly manner.
Without a word Dillon started the car, the headlights spearing the darkness. It had to be late—the sky stayed light till almost ten that time of year. Would her parents wonder where she was when they got back from their cocktail party? No, they’d assume she was at the prom, safe in the care of a good boy who’d look out for her and keep her safe.
But that good boy had dumped her. And even her beloved Nate was doing a piss-poor job of seeing to her welfare, leaving her in the hands of a…a…she couldn’t even think of the word for Dillon.
She tried to sit up, but Dillon simply put a hand on her shoulder and shoved her down again. “You need your rest,” he said, pushing her head down to rest on one hard thigh. She couldn’t have sat up if she tried, but then she heard the telltale sounds from the back seat and realized that Nate and his girlfriend were doing more than necking. And she definitely didn’t want to be seeing that.
She stopped resisting, letting her head fall against the soft denim that covered Dillon’s leg. “That’s right,” he murmured, so quietly that the two in the back couldn’t hear him. Not that they were paying attention. “Just stay put and you won’t see anything you don’t want to see.”
Dillon had pulled out of the parking area and was driving down the tree-shrouded back road, fast, with one hand holding the steering wheel, the other draped casually on her shoulder. He was stroking her, absentmindedly, she assumed, his long fingers brushing against her arm, trailing up the side of her neck to brush her hair away. She had no illusions that he’d let her sit up—every time she tried he simply exerted enough pressure to keep her down. She gave up fighting, letting out her breath and letting her head rest on his thigh.
“That’s better,” he said, softly enough that the words were torn away by the wind rushing past them. And she closed her eyes, breathing in the night air, the smell of beer and denim and spring flowers. The scent of her on his hand as he slowly stroked her neck.
She almost fell asleep. She could hear the noises from the back seat, but she didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to think about what Dillon had done to her. Didn’t want think about anything but the quiet sense of calm that surrounded her as Dillon stroked her neck.
She heard the music first, echoing through the woods, loud and insistent. Dillon pulled the car to a stop, and this time when she tried to sit up he let her, let her scurry over to the far side of the car, while he showed nothing more than a faint smile.
At least Nate and his friend had resurfaced, flushed, half dressed, but finished with whatever they were doing. Nate scrambled out of the car, leaving his girlfriend to follow after him, but he paused to give Jamie a hand. A good thing, too, because her legs were still shaky. People surged around them, all of them strangers, most of them drunk or stoned, and she turned back to look for Dillon.
He already had his tongue down the throat of some girl who’d plastered herself against him. Except that he was holding on to her, holding her hips against his, and she’d already managed to unfasten the final buttons of his shirt. The shirt he’d unbuttoned for her.
She knew she hadn’t made a sound, but he broke the kiss for a moment, turning back to glance at Jamie. She couldn’t read his expression, and she knew she must have looked totally pathetic. “Hey, Pauly,” he said to somebody standing nearby. “Nate brought his little sister along. Look after her, will you?”
She didn’t even bother to correct him. Nate had already disappeared into the crowd, and Dillon had his hand on the huge breast of the girl who’d greeted him so enthusiastically. Totally forgetting about her.
“Hey, there, Jamie.” And she realized with a shock who Pauly was. Paul Jameson, quarterback of the football team, president of the student council, tall, gorgeous, every girl’s dream. He was slightly drunk, and his dark hair was flopped over his forehead in an endearing tangle. “Wanna drink?” He had a bottle of tequila in his hand.
She looked back toward Dillon, but he’d disappeared, without a backward glance. “Sure,” she said. And he handed her the bottle.
Jamie wasn’t accomplishing a goddamned thing, remembering that night. She’d put it out of her mind long ago, with a combination of determination, a good therapist and the judicious use of tranquilizers. Whenever the memories hit her she usually just popped a pill and the clawing anxiety would pass.
But the pills were in her purse, and her purse was gone. And the couldn’t spend the day in her room, hiding.
She sat up, then froze in horror. The door was open, and Dillon was standing in the darkened hallway, watching her, that same unreadable expression on his face. He was so different from the boy in the Cadillac all those years ago. He was exactly the same.
“Someone took my purse,” she said.
He looked neither surprised nor shocked. “Did you leave it in the car?”
“No. I brought it up here. Someone came into my room and took it.” She wasn’t certain of her ability to get to her feet with complete grace, so she stayed where she was, sitting on the thin mattress.
“And you think it was me? Not likely, sweetheart. I have no particular interest in keeping you around here, and the lack of your purse is going to slow your departure considerably. I know you like to blame me for everything that’s ever gone wrong in your and Nate’s life, but this time I’m innocent.”
“For some reason the very notion of you being innocent of anything is beyond my comprehension. And don’t call me sweetheart!” There was no question that Dillon brought out the worst in her. She’d spent her life trying to be compassionate, calm and forgiving, and Dillon made her shake with anger.
“What do you prefer I call you? Baby girl?”
It was like a punch in the stomach. He hadn’t forgotten that night. She didn’t even have that small comfort. At least he’d been too out of it to remember details.
She ignored it. “So if you didn’t take my purse, who did? The dead rat? Nate’s ghost?”
“You never can tell.” He made no effort to come into the room, but it was little comfort. He still loomed over her, and she decided it was better to scramble to her feet and risk looking clumsy than to keep staring up at him from such a subservient position. She knew enough about body language and politics to know this was only making her sense of powerlessness worse.
She got to her feet without stumbling, and even took a step toward him, just to show that she wasn’t afraid of him. “Where did you say the telephone was?” she said. “I need to call my mother and have her wire me some money.”
“Down in the garage. But you’ll have to call collect, princess.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You have to have more than a pay phone here!”
He shook his head. “No need. There aren’t that many people I want to talk to.”
“Or who want to talk to you?”
“You got it. You shouldn’t have any trouble finding it. I’m going to take a shower.”
“I’d appreciate the privacy.”
“Whereas I couldn’t care less. If you have any interest in joining me in the shower—”
“I don’t!” He was saying it just to annoy her, but it worked, to her utter shame.
“Give the Duchess my love, then,” Dillon said lazily. And he closed the door behind him.
He was lying to her. Nate hovered overhead in a dreamlike state. He’d always been a good liar, and he could recognize when his old friend was lying, as well. What did Dillon want with jamie? Maybe what he’d always wanted with Jamie and had never admitted .
It didn’t mean that Nate didn’t know just how fixated Dillon Gaynor had always been with little Jamie. And now she was here, stuck in the old building with no one to play chaperone but the ghost of the one person they had in common .
He was going to enjoy this .
5
A t least he’d left the door open to the kitchen, so that light filtered into the bottom of the stairwell. There’d be no dead rats beneath her bare feet this time, thank God. Just the live one upstairs in the shower.
Jamie didn’t want to think about that. Dillon and a shower meant Dillon naked, and that was one image she could happily do without. The only mental image she wanted of Dillon was with his head on a platter.
No, she didn’t even care that much, she reminded herself as she crossed the now surprisingly neat kitchen. She just wanted to be gone. To take Nate’s few possessions and get the hell out of there. Dillon unsettled her, even after all these years. Unsettled her more than the unanswered questions about Nate’s death. She’d loved her cousin, deeply, but in the last few years she’d lost most of her illusions about him. Nate was a bad boy, maybe almost as bad as Dillon Gaynor. He’d done drugs, he’d broken the law, he’d broken her mother’s heart. With his charm and good looks he’d managed to talk himself out of the consequences for his bad behavior. Until at the end, when someone, maybe even his childhood friend, had had enough and killed him.
Nothing was going to bring him back. Nothing would make the loss of him less painful, not the truth, not revenge. In fact, they’d lost Nate long ago. He needed to rest in peace.
But her mother wasn’t about to accept that simple truth, and Jamie would have done anything Isobel asked of her. Except that this time it was too much, and she needed to get the hell out of there.
She dreaded going into the garage to use the pay phone but she had no choice. “Why in heaven’s name are you calling me collect, Jamie?” she greeted her in the faint, slightly querulous tone she’d taken to using in the last few years. “You have a cell phone and a phone card.”
“I’ve lost my purse,” Jamie said flatly. And then guilt hit her. “How are you feeling, Mother?”
“The same,” Isobel said with a sigh. “What can one expect? How did you happen to lose your purse? Where are you, for that matter? Have you seen that man?”
Jamie had no doubts that “that man” was Dillon. “I’m here in Wisconsin. At his garage. My car went off the road, I lost my purse, and I need to get home.”
“How unfortunate,” Isobel said in her faint voice. “And a bit careless of you. How long have you been there?”
Jamie took a deep breath. “Twelve hours. Twelve hours too long. I need you to wire me some money, and any form of identification of mine you can find. Bella can look for you. She could even call the motor vehicle department to see what I need to do about my driver’s license. I can’t rent a car without one, even if I have a credit card.”
“I try not to ask my nurse to do personal favors for me,” Isobel said stiffly. “She’s got enough to do, taking care of an old woman in a wheelchair.”
Jamie pounded her forehead against the wall beside the pay phone, just once. Isobel never missed a chance to use her crippling arthritis as a weapon. “I don’t think Bella would mind in an emergency,” Jamie said.
“I don’t see that it’s an emergency. You’re staying with Dillon, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then that’s perfect. Your cousin died there, Jamie. Our Nate was murdered there, and now you have the perfect chance to find out what happened.”
“I’m not Nancy Drew, Mother.”
“Don’t be flippant with me,” Isobel said in her faint tones. “You care just as much as I do—you can’t fool me. A few days there won’t do you any harm. I’ll call my lawyer and have him put something in motion to get your paperwork back for you, but in the meantime you stay put and pay attention. Nothing happens without a reason. I think fate must have wanted you there.”
Jamie didn’t bother arguing. She loved her mother dearly, but Isobel did tend to think fate worked at Isobel Kincaid’s whim. She was a Kincaid, after all, twice over. She’d even married her second cousin Victor, and Nate used to say she’d done it just to keep the name.
“I really don’t want…” she tried one more time, but Isobel sailed right over her, her voice uncharacteristically strong.
“I don’t think your wants should be paramount right now, Jamie. I’ll call Miss Finch’s—I’m sure they can make do without you for a few days. In the meantime you should concentrate on what happened to Nate. Why he was even there, what he did during his last days. Anything.”
That tone of desperation had slid into Isobel’s voice, the one that always destroyed Jamie’s defenses. “All right, Mother,” she said wearily. “I’ll give it a few days.”
“Thank you, Jamie. I knew I could count on you. After all, we both loved him so much.”
“Yes, we did,” Jamie said. “Let me give you…”
“Goodbye, darling.”
“…the telephone number here.” But Isobel had already hung up. Jamie stared at the phone in frustration. She could always try calling her back, but knowing Isobel’s gift for getting what she wanted, she probably wouldn’t answer the phone. Either that or she’d refuse to accept the collect charges.
She was trapped. She resisted temptation, putting the telephone back into its cradle very carefully. Her mother was right—a couple of days wouldn’t kill her. And surely she could do something herself about getting her license and credit cards back. If only Dillon had a goddamned private telephone line.
She headed back toward the kitchen, then paused, looking at the cavernous garage.
It must have been some kind of warehouse or factory in the distant past. The place was huge, with a line of cars along both ends, half of them covered with tarps. She recognized an old Thunderbird, a Mustang Cobra and a stately ’49 Oldsmobile. For some reason she had always been good at recognizing cars, and the ones she could see in Dillon’s garage were beautiful and rare.
There were two more in various stages of disarray. The one missing an engine was a Ford from 1954 or 1955. The other was nothing less than a Duesenberg.
She took a step, irresistibly drawn to it. It had taken the years with surprising dignity, and even in its current state it had a certain grace and elegance that filled her with a rare covetousness. She’d never been particularly materialistic—her needs had always been more emotional and elemental. But looking at the old Duesenberg, she wanted it.
She turned her back on it, resolutely, and stalked to the kitchen. There was no sign of Dillon, thank God, and she was hungry. It was no wonder the man was still skinny—there wasn’t even enough food in his cupboards to feed the dead rat. She half expected to find pellets all over the place, but whatever rodents had taken possession of the kitchen had left no sign behind.
She gave up looking, starting to eat stale Wheaties from the box, when the door opened and a very small guardian angel stepped in. Or more specifically, Mouser, with a boxful of groceries.
“Hi, there, sugar,” he greeted her. “I brought you some food. Dillon never has a damned thing in the house, and I figured you’d be starving about now. Don’t eat those Wheaties—I think the guy on the box was in the 1936 Olympics.”
She set the box down hurriedly, swallowing her last dry mouthful. The little man was unpacking milk, orange juice and a bakery box that smelled like divine intervention.
“Cinnamon buns, no nuts, right?” he said.
She’d already opened the box, but she jerked her head up at his words. “How did you know that’s what I like?” she demanded sharply.
Mouser shrugged. “Nate musta said something. I got a good memory for things like that.”
“But Nate didn’t. I don’t think he had any idea whether I liked nuts or not.”
“Well, hell, I musta got you mixed up with someone else. I’ll get them with nuts tomorrow,” he said, unabashed.
“No, this is perfect,” she said hurriedly, realizing she must have sounded rude. Isobel had drummed good manners into her, good manners above all things. Besides, what did it matter if someone knew she didn’t like nuts on anything?
“And some decent coffee,” Mouser added, setting a tall cardboard mug in front of her. “Dillon uses the stuff he makes to strip the rust off old car parts.”
“I’d resent that if I didn’t know you’d brought me some, too,” Dillon said from the open doorway.
Jamie turned at the sound of his voice, and then quickly looked away. He was shirtless, his long hair wet, his feet bare. She should have known he’d look even better than he had at eighteen, the glorious golden bad boy of Marshfield, Rhode Island. She took the top off her cup of coffee, and the scent of hazelnut wafted up, as tempting as…tempting.
“Hey, I’m a sucker,” Mouser said, sitting down at the table and opening the box of cinnamon buns. “Aren’t you going to work today?”
“I was planning to.” Before he took a chair beside her he put his shirt on, but didn’t bother to button it. And his feet were still bare. “Hand over my coffee.” Dillon took a big gulp from the paper cup Mouser handed him, then looked at it in horror. “What is this shit?” he demanded.
“Hazelnut coffee. I thought it was time to broaden your horizons.”
“My coffee horizons are just fine as they are,” Dillon said, grimacing as he took another deep drink. “Now, if you want to talk about something more interesting, like a ’49 Studebaker, then—”
“I need to get out of here!” Jamie broke in.
Dillon turned to look at her, as if he’d just realized she was there. “And I’d like to get rid of you,” he said affably. “The perfect partnership. What do you expect me to do?”
“My purse is gone.”
“So you said. Call the Duchess and have her wire you what you need.”
“I did. She says she will. Eventually. In the meantime she wants me to stay here.”
She’d managed to surprise him. “The Duchess wants you in my evil clutches? Any reason why she’d choose you to be the virgin sacrifice?”
Virgin sacrifice . The phrase should have been light, comical. But it held too many loaded memories. For her, not for him. The years of alcohol and drugs had probably blotted out unpleasant memories for Dillon Gaynor. Sooner or later it would begin to show on his face. Right now he just looked older, sexier. His mouth was just as tempting as it had always been. It had tasted of cigarettes and beer, she remembered vividly. Even after all this time, no matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t forget Dillon’s taste.
“What are you staring at?” he said, reaching for the pack of cigarettes on the table.
Mouser slapped his hand. “I thought you were trying to quit.”
“I am. But not at this particularly stressful time in my life. I’ll wait till I don’t have guests,” he said, lighting one. “You didn’t answer my question. Why does the Duchess want you here?”
“She wants me to find out what happened to Nate.”
“He died.”
The knowledge still hurt, but she wasn’t about to show it. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
He took a deep drag of the cigarette, his eyes narrowed over the exhaled smoke. “I could tell you a lot of things you don’t know, child. There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded.
“It means that even if I told you, showed you, you wouldn’t believe it. You’ve set up your own belief system long ago, and nothing could ever shake it. Not that it should. You can go back to Rhode Island and live in your safe little cocoon. Didn’t you ever want to leave there?” he added with a swift change of topic.
“Not particularly.” It was a lie, but he wouldn’t know that. She felt stifled in the small college town where she’d spent her entire life. Anything, even a run-down garage in the middle of nowhere, would have been preferable.
“So what’s needed to get you the hell out of here?” he said, reaching for the last cinnamon bun. It wasn’t until that moment that Jamie realized she’d eaten the other three, out of sheer nervousness.
“My purse with all my credit cards and identification, for one thing.”
“I haven’t seen it,” Dillon said flatly. “What about you, Mouser? Did you run off with the lady’s purse?”
“Not me, Killer,” Mouser protested, absolutely innocent.
Jamie was about to finish her coffee, but she set it back down with a steady hand. “Why do they still call you that?” she asked.
He shrugged, stubbing out the half-finished cigarette. “Maybe I deserve it. Or maybe my fame follows me wherever I go. So no one knows where you left your purse. What do we do next?”
“I need to have my car working, and I need enough money to pay for gas to get me back to the East Coast.”
“Little enough to ask, and I’d be more than happy to pay you off to get you out of here. But your car’s been towed to a place across town, and Mick isn’t sure when he can get to it. And it’s against the law to drive without your license on you.”
“I’ll risk it,” she said dryly. “Besides, when did you ever care about what’s legal and what’s not?”
He shrugged again. “Just thinking of your lilywhite reputation, Ms. Kincaid. Accept it—the car’s out of reach for the time being. You can stay until it’s fixed, or you can come up with another solution.”
“Like what? I need money. I need my credit cards. I need my cell phone and my driver’s license. I can’t rent a car or buy an airplane ticket without a credit card and proper identification.”
“Then I guess you’re shit out of luck,” he said mildly. “And I’m doomed to have an unwanted guest for the next few days. Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. Mick’s an old friend, and if he knows we’ll end up killing each other if you don’t get out of here he’ll put a rush on it. In the meantime, you’re going to have to sit back and put up with me. But then, you’re good at enduring, aren’t you? You’ve had to put up with the Duchess all your life.”
“Stop calling her that! I love my mother.”
“Of course you do. Even though she doted on Nate and barely noticed you were alive. You’re a glutton for punishment, Jamie.”
“Not anymore,” she snapped, pushing away from the table. “I don’t suppose you have a car I could drive?”
“None of my beauties. They’re worth too much to risk in the hands of an unlicensed driver,” he said in a lazy voice.
“You know I really hate you, don’t you?”
“I believe you’ve mentioned it before. As long as your mother’s whispering in your ear I wouldn’t expect you to change your mind.”
She was already at the door. “Would you want me to change my mind?”
She’d managed to startle him. He paused, clearly giving it some reflection. “It might prove interesting.”
She slammed the door behind her.
The sound of it was satisfying. The bite of the winter air wasn’t. She’d gone storming out with nothing but a sweatshirt and a pair of sneakers, and the snow was at least three inches deep on the ground.
She turned back to look at the door. There was no way she could walk back in there, not after her grand exit. She was going to have to stand out there in the cold for at least a half an hour, and in that time she’d probably develop pneumonia, which would solve everything. She’d go into the hospital, or Dillon would creep into her room at night and open the windows over her fevered, prostrate body to hurry her along. And she wasn’t quite sure which of those options was preferable.
She was shivering, her body racked with cold, when the door behind her opened. She should have stomped off, but Dillon’s garage was in a particularly unsavory part of an unsavory town, and even in broad daylight she didn’t feel too safe exploring.
She didn’t turn, keeping her back rigid, trying to control the shivers. He could apologize until he was blue in the face. Though actually she was the one who was turning blue.
“He’s gone into the garage to work,” Mouser said. “Come in before you freeze your…freeze to death.”
She turned to look at the little man. “Dillon is an asshole,” she said flatly.
Mouser’s wizened face creased in a smile. “Can’t argue with you on that one. He’s always been a difficult son of a bitch. Doesn’t mean you need to catch your death of cold. Because if you get sick while you’re here I don’t think he’s going to be bringing you chicken soup and aspirin. He’s not exactly the nurturing type, is he?”
“Not exactly,” Jamie said, following him into the kitchen and closing the door behind her. It was warm, blessedly warm, and she rubbed her hands together to try to bring some life back.
“You’re as stubborn as he is, aren’t you?” Mouser said. “That’s going to be trouble.”
“No, it’s not. I’m going to get out of here and never see him again. I don’t know what his problem is—you can’t tell me he couldn’t come up with a car I could use and a hundred bucks to cover gas.”
“I wouldn’t tell you that Dillon couldn’t do anything. He’s very resourceful. Must be he doesn’t want to help you.”
“I can believe that. But I’d think getting rid of me would be more important than his dislike of me.”
Mouser’s smile exposed a set of startlingly perfect teeth. Undoubtedly dentures. “You think he dislikes you?”
“Of course. He dislikes me just as much as I dislike him,” Jamie said flatly.
“Well, if you put it that way, that’s a possibility,” Mouser said in a dry voice. “But bottom line, Jamie, is that I’ve known him well for the last five years, and I know what he thinks about things. And in your case, dislike doesn’t have much to do with it.”
“Okay, hatred,” Jamie supplied.
Mouser shook his head. “Not exactly. You’ll have a chance to figure it out in the next few days, both of you. It’ll be a good thing. Too much unfinished business between the two of you.”
“What makes you think that?” Jamie demanded. “I can’t believe he’s ever even mentioned me. Even thought of me in the last five years.”
“You forget, Nate was here. You were mentioned. Why don’t you ask Killer about it. He just might tell you.” Mouser was shrugging into his heavy jacket, preparing to head out into the icy Wisconsin weather.
“You think I won’t?” Jamie said. “I’m here for answers.”
“Good for you. And if you pay attention, maybe he’ll give them to you. If you really want them.”
And he closed the door gently behind him, leaving Jamie alone in the kitchen. Wondering if she really did want all the answers, after all.
He could smell the cinnamon and hazelnut floating up toward him. Funny, he’d forgotten what it was like to eat, to feel warm, to touch, but his sense of smell was still powerful. He could recognize the smell of Killer’s shampoo, he could tell when Jamie was moving far beneath him. Trapped as he was, he could feel everything, smell everything, know everything. Except how to escape .
Unfinished business, isn’t that the sort of thing that kept ghosts tied to a place? Nate had unfinished business, and as soon as he figured out what it was, he’d be able to leave.
It might be as simple as killing Dillon. Or getting someone to do it. Or maybe he had to be finished with Jamie, as well. A murder-suicide pact would be perfect, but highly unlikely. Unless Jamie could be persuaded to shoot Dillon.
It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. Anything could happen, and there was a lot of history between them. They were just as haunted by the past as they were by his shadowy presence.
It still waited to be seen which of the two would prove the stronger. And the more destructive.
6
J amie considered herself riddled with flaws, but cowardice wasn’t one of them. Yes, she wanted to get the hell out of there rather than confront the past and the possibly unpalatable truth about Nate, but fate, or her mother, had decreed otherwise. She was stuck here for at least a couple of days, and she wasn’t going to spend that time avoiding Dillon. Besides, the bigger a pain in the butt she was, the more motivated he’d be to help her leave.
She shoved her hair back from her face and straightened to her full height. She was too short, almost a foot shorter than Dillon, and she always thought that he would have been easier to deal with if he didn’t tower over her. He thought he could bury his head inside a car engine and ignore her, but she was about to disabuse him of that notion. She was going to be a total pest until she got out of there.
She opened the door to the cavernous garage and was immediately assaulted by noise, a vast rumbling that had been almost completely muffled. She closed the door behind her and began to sort through the cacophony. The rush of white noise was actually some kind of space heater, spewing hot air into the vast expanse of the room. The music was loud, too, Nirvana, Jamie suspected, though she’d never been that fond of the group. But Dillon had always favored the raw-pain sound of Kurt Cobain.
Beneath it all was the rumble and roar of a car engine, punctuated with the steady sound of a hammer on metal. And then a stream of curses as Dillon emerged from beneath the hood of the Duesenberg.
She’d half hoped to watch him for a bit without him realizing she was there, but he honed right in on her, his eyes narrowing. It was too loud to do anything other than shout, and Dillon wasn’t about to bother raising his voice. He simply disappeared back beneath the hood of the old car, leaving Jamie with two choices. She could go back into the kitchen and wait. Or she could go over there and make him talk to her.
The kitchen option sounded immensely appealing, but Jamie was made of sterner stuff than that. She wasn’t about to turn off the heat—her sojourn in the alleyway still hadn’t worn off completely—but she could put a stop to the cacophony blaring from the huge stereo system.
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Anne Stuart
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A year ago Jamie learned that her beloved cousin, Nate, had been killed. Beaten to death in what police suspect was a drug deal gone wrong, he was found by his childhood friend Dillon Gaynor.Dillon had always been the baddest of the bad boys, leading Nate astray, and Jamie knows he has the answers to her questions about Nate′s death. He′s not about to volunteer any information, and Jamie′s only choice is to head to the Wisconsin town where he lives to find the answers for herself.Jamie shows up unannounced on Dillon′s doorstep, only to find that Dillon is as dangerous and seductive as she remembers. But despite his silky hostility, she discovers she can′t leave. Things start disappearing, strange accidents begin to happen and Jamie doesn′t know whether Dillon is trying to seduce her or scare her away. And if she gives in to his predatory games, will she lose her soul? Or her life?But something else–something evil and threatening–is going on. And Dillon knows more than he′s saying. Is he the one behind the strange threats…or is he Jamie′s only chance for survival?